protest

Echoes of Resistance: From 1968 to Gaza, the Unyielding Voices of Student Protests

[Pictured: Anti-genocide student protestors face a line of law enforcement during a demonstration at UT-Austin. Credit: Julius Shieh for The Texas Tribune]


By Peter S. Baron


As students continue to gather in protest, standing up for the humanity of Gazans being slaughtered by a maniacally genocidal coalition of ruling elites obsessed with profit and geopolitical maneuvering, it's insightful to reflect on the history of student protests. Understanding the impact of past movements can help gauge the potential of today's collective awakening.

 

A History of Student Resistance

In 1968, the air in France was charged with rebellion. It all started at the University of Nanterre, where students kicked against the strict, outdated rules of their university and the deeper issues of government authoritarianism and the Vietnam War. The authorities shut the university down on May 2, which only pushed the students to take their protests to the Sorbonne in Paris.

The situation escalated quickly.

The police clamped down hard on the protests at the Sorbonne, using force on students. This reaction sparked a massive response not just from other students but from workers across the country. Seeing their own struggles in the students’ fight, France’s major trade unions called a one-day general strike on May 13. What started as a protest became a nationwide shutdown.

The movement exploded. By the end of May, about 10 million workers—that's two-thirds of the French workforce—had stopped working. Factories, universities, and public services ground to a halt. Workers and students gathered in occupied spaces, debating and planning what France should become. They didn’t just want better wages or conditions; they were calling for a whole new way of running the country.

This was too much for President Charles de Gaulle, who saw his control slipping away. In a stunning move, he secretly fled to West Germany to meet with a loyal general, possibly to discuss using the military to regain control. This moment of panic highlighted just how serious things had become.

Despite the revolutionary fervor, the crisis did not culminate in a revolution. De Gaulle returned to France, dissolved the National Assembly, and called for new elections. This move, combined with negotiations that led to substantial wage increases and improved working conditions, caused the momentum of the protests to dissipate. In the June elections, de Gaulle’s party won a significant majority, reflecting a conservative backlash against the upheaval.

The initial response to the student protests in 1968 involved shutting down universities and deploying aggressive police tactics, much like what we're witnessing on college campuses today. These actions were clear attempts by the state to clamp down on dissent and regain control. However, as the movement expanded beyond students and began to mobilize the broader working class, the tactics of the state and capitalist interests evolved. Faced with a growing and powerful movement, they shifted towards strategies of co-optation and superficial reform, aiming to dilute the movement's momentum by seemingly addressing some grievances while preserving the underlying capitalist structure.

The concessions offered by President Charles de Gaulle—wage increases, improved working conditions, and the promise of educational reforms—should be seen as strategic moves to quell dissent. These reforms were significant enough to placate the immediate economic grievances of the working class and to demonstrate a responsiveness by the government, thereby splitting the coalition between students and workers. By integrating demands that did not threaten the core of capitalist structures, de Gaulle's administration managed to dissipate revolutionary momentum, demonstrating that state apparatuses function to reproduce the conditions of production favorable to the capitalist mode.

The resolution of the May 1968 events through electoral politics and limited social reforms highlights the function of the capitalist state as a mediator in class struggle, which subtly shifts societal alignments to favor the elite. This outcome exemplifies the stabilizing mechanisms of capitalist societies, which, through reformist policies, manage to integrate and neutralize opposition without addressing the underlying dynamics of capitalist accumulation and exploitation.

 

Lessons in Solidarity

The broader implication of these events teaches us that reformist policies are primarily implemented to address the immediate, most visible problems of social unrest, with the ultimate goal of maintaining the underlying capitalist structure. This dynamic ensures that while capitalism might appear more humane after reforms, its fundamental drives—primarily the accumulation of capital at the expense of mass labor—are left intact. This approach allows the capitalist framework to persist largely unchanged, as it continues to benefit those in power while giving the appearance of responsiveness and concern for social issues. As evidenced by the aftermath of the 1968 protests, this malicious strategy serves to delay or diffuse the revolutionary potential of mass movements, channeling grievances into reforms that do not alter the basic relations of power and production.

Thus, the 1968 student protests in France not only reveal the power of grassroots movements to enact significant changes but also highlight the complexities and limitations of such changes within the capitalist framework. The episode serves as a reminder of the enduring challenge for revolutionary movements: to navigate the delicate balance between achieving immediate improvements and maintaining the momentum necessary for profound systemic change.

Today, we must remain unyieldingly vigilant as guardians against those forces eager to co-opt the energy and direction of the student movement. We should criticize how figures touted as progressives, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have positioned themselves near the forefront, claiming solidarity with the students. Their actions betray their words. A genuine ally would not endorse and actively campaign for Joe Biden, who recently authorized an additional $26 billion in aid to Israel, amid ongoing reports of atrocities. Biden’s and the Democrats’ support of Israeli rulers continues nearly seven months into what can only be described as a genocide, with horrifying discoveries of mass graves that include hundreds of children and medical professionals, identified by their scrubs, executed with their hands bound and bullet wounds in their skulls. This is the same Israeli leadership that vilifies Gazans with dehumanizing rhetoric, labeling them as "human animals" and "monsters." Ask yourself, would a genuine ally funnel $260,000, collected from grassroots progressives, into the coffers of the DNC (as AOC has done)—the very organization backing the continued financial support of these atrocities?

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This supposed alliance comes as nearly 40,000 lives, including those of 15,000 children, have been extinguished. Hospitals, schools, churches, and mosques crumble under bombs, while essential humanitarian aid is obstructed, leaving millions to the brink of dehydration and starvation, with many forced to drink and bathe in dirty water while they eat grass to survive. Amid this barbarity, the cruel decision to cut electricity in Gaza inflicts unspeakable suffering, forcing children, their bodies crushed by the rubble of their own homes, to endure the brutal procedure of amputations without any anesthesia.

These acts of sheer inhumanity lay bare the merciless nature of the assault, exposing the vulnerable to unimaginable pain in their most desperate moments. These are not the acts of allies but of political actors playing their roles in a theater of cruelty and betrayal. We must reject these charades and build our movements away from the shadows of such treacherous alliances.

These so-called progressive politicians masquerade as the vanguards of change, yet their true motive is to herd our collective outrage by transforming it into campaign donations that serve as financial fuel for those who steadfastly maintain the oppressive status quo. The genocide unfolding before our eyes is not a mere clash of ideologies or religions, nor is it simply about backing allies. It's the direct result of a rapacious economic and political system driven by profit at any cost. Our leaders, slaves to their own ambition for power, prostrate themselves before their corporate masters. Their support for Israel isn't just about lobbying dollars from groups like AIPAC; it's fundamentally about the benefits the U.S. capitalist regime derives from Israel's strategic position. Indeed, as Joe Biden once starkly noted, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel.”

The U.S.'s backing of Israel is intricately linked to the military-industrial complex, the control of oil, and the militarization of key global trade routes. This alliance fuels massive arms sales and defense contracts, enriching U.S. corporations and bolstering the military-industrial complex. By aligning with Israel, strategically located near pivotal oil-producing nations, the U.S. ensures its grip on crucial Middle Eastern oil reserves, a vital resource in the global economy. This geopolitical strategy extends to controlling vital trade routes, securing economic and military advantages by keeping these critical channels under Western dominance.

In a system incentivizing the corporate chase for monopolized total control, war becomes a necessity, serving as a means to redistribute and further concentrate the world's resources among the global elite while feeding the insatiable profit motives of the weapons industry. Inevitably, capitalism leaves destruction in its wake, whether it was the Vietnamese in 1968 or the Gazans today, bearing the brutal consequences of capitalism's genocidal tendencies.

 

A New Vision

Despite its shortcomings, the events of May 1968 changed France. They didn’t overthrow the government, but they broke through old barriers, changing laws and attitudes, especially in education and labor. The spirit of those weeks, when it seemed like anything was possible, still lights up the imagination of people fighting for a better world. The 1968 protests showed that when people come together, they can shake the foundations of power, even if they don’t knock them down completely.

Today, we must heed the lessons of 1968. In the spirit of a grassroots revolution, the transformation from student protests into a comprehensive movement built on the principles of disengagement from corrupted institutions and the establishment of mutual aid and free agreement begins with a profound collective realization. This realization is that the existing structures—be they educational, governmental, or corporate—are not only failing to address but are complicit in systemic injustices.

Our emerging movement starts as a series of interconnected local actions, where students and workers come together, recognizing their shared plight and common goals. As they gather, initially stirred by the desire to protest, they begin to form more structured groups—collective councils—comprising representatives from various student organizations, local labor unions, and community advocates. These councils serve as the initial scaffolding for a new kind of governance, one that operates on consensus and inclusivity, eschewing the hierarchical models they aim to dismantle.

Skill-sharing emerges as a fundamental activity within these groups, not just as a means to empower and educate, but as a cornerstone of building self-sufficiency. Workshops on urban agriculture, basic healthcare, community safety, and renewable energy initiatives are organized, utilizing occupied spaces such as unused university buildings or public parks, transforming them into hubs of learning and operation.

As the councils gain more traction, a general strike becomes the first major coordinated action, signaling the movement's seriousness and unity to a broader audience. This strike isn't just a cessation of work; it's a powerful act of reclaiming spaces and redirecting resources towards the newly forming mutual aid systems. These spaces become centers where resources—food, medical supplies, educational materials—are distributed not based on the ability to pay, but on need, a principle central to the philosophy of mutual aid.

Parallel to these practical endeavors, the movement begins to redefine education. It distances itself from traditional curricula that often perpetuate the dominant ideologies of the state and capitalism, and instead fosters a curriculum that includes critical pedagogy, decolonial studies, and practical skills for community and personal development. These classes are open to all, free of charge, and are taught by a rotating group of community members, each sharing their specific knowledge and skills.

Community defense groups also form, not as militias, but as protective bodies to ensure the safety of the spaces and their occupants. These groups practice non-violent tactics and community conflict resolution, embodying the principles of defense without aggression.

As these new systems begin to take root, they do not exist in isolation. The movement actively documents its processes and outcomes, creating detailed guides and resources that are shared widely with other groups nationally and internationally. This documentation is crucial, not just for transparency and learning, but also as a blueprint for others who wish to replicate the model in their own communities.

Networking with other similar movements creates a tapestry of resistance and mutual aid that spans borders, each node learning from and supporting others. Regular assemblies are held where experiences and ideas are exchanged, ensuring the movement remains dynamic and responsive to the needs of its participants.

Through all these phases, the guiding principles remain clear: a steadfast commitment to disengaging from and dismantling corrupted institutions; the establishment of mutual aid as a fundamental economic and social principle; and the adherence to free agreement, ensuring that every participant's voice is heard and valued in the decision-making process.

We must believe in this vision. This movement, guided by the principles of mutual aid and free agreement, will naturally take its own course, shaped by the specific needs and conditions of each community it touches. Our diversity will be our power, enhancing our resilience by fueling our capacity to innovate and effectively tackle challenges across our decentralized network. This is an organic, evolving revolution, grounded not just in the desire to protest, but to create viable, sustainable alternatives to the systems that have failed so many. Through these efforts, what begins as a series of local protests can evolve into a profound transformation of society, embodying the change that was once only dared imagined. As Ursula Le Guin reminded us in her groundbreaking novel The Dispossessed, all we have is solidarity with each other. Fortunately, that is all we need.

 


Peter S. Baron is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society” (https://www.ifonlyweknewbook.com) and is currently pursuing a J.D. and M.A. in Philosophy at Georgetown University.

The Imperative to Organize: What Palestine Needs from Us Now

[Photo Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu, AP]


By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso and Salma Hamamy


On October 7th, the Islamic Resistance Movement — a Palestinian political and military organization based in Gaza better known as Hamas — began a multi-faceted attack against the settler colony of Israel. The operation included aerial rocket launches and on-the-ground operations. The attack marked only the latest bout of Palestinian resistance against the sieges, occupations, and ethnic cleansing campaigns that have fundamentally characterized the Israeli state, an entity built on these very atrocities since its founding in 1948. With a dreadful immediacy, Israel responded to the attack in kind, and then some.

The war crimes and genocidal exploits that have unfolded since the fighting began are too multitudinous to list in full. But suffice it to say that Israel has unleashed an endless shower of hospital and school bombings — collective punishment galore. As of December 18th, Israel has slaughtered almost 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 70% of whom were women and children. Meanwhile, the Israeli death toll stands at about 1,200. 

Immediately following October 7th, the United States predictably offered Israel — its client state — unconditional support. Soon thereafter, they expanded the gesture by offering military contributions and punishing domestic dissent. In contrast, the American public has largely opposed their government’s pro-Israel posture. An estimated 300,000 protesters marched on Washington in support of Palestine last month. The event featured speakers such as writer Mohammed El-Kurd, musician Macklemore, and lawyer Noura Erakat. It brought together groups from 22 states including California, Illinois, and New Jersey. Two of the largest labor unions in the country — the United Auto Workers and the American Postal Workers Union — have voiced their support for a ceasefire in the region.

Waves of pro-Palestine advocacy have overtaken social media, much to the chagrin of executives and algorithmic gatekeepers. Popular methods of demonstrating solidarity also include calling, emailing, and faxing politicians, donating to pro-Palestine organizations and humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, boycotting pro-Israel companies, and attending protests and direct actions such as strikes and walkouts. These tactics have all made major headway in nurturing a greater collective consciousness in the United States that supports the Palestinian cause and feels evermore compelled to apply liberatory praxis wherever systemic oppression rears its hegemonic head.

Meanwhile, the situation in Gaza worsens by the hour. The twice-renewed humanitarian pause that began on November 24th ended on December 1st, doing little to ameliorate the displacement, destruction, and brutality that Israel has subjected Gazans to for over two months now. The moment demands an additional layer of action on the part of comrades living outside the occupied territories. Beyond the more traditional forms of activism, we must also embody the organizer spirit in our daily lives. In other words, allies of the Palestinian cause must view our various social relationships and networks as breeding grounds for heightened awareness and collective action. 

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Individualized actions done in unison may spark a wave. But organized actions done in community build a tide. As agents in this transformational moment, we now have a responsibility — to our Palestinian comrades and to ourselves — to organize our immediate surroundings, ensuring that no stone goes unturned. Workplaces, friend groups, family units, neighborhoods, and the like all provide pre-established groupings within which communal awareness and collective action can grow. Beginning with the most promising group, the first step is to start organizational conversations with fellow group members.

These interactions can take many forms, such as further publicizing one’s support for Palestine, pushing back against pro-Israel rhetoric and apologia, wearing clothing that physically depicts solidarity with the Palestinian cause (e.g., keffiyeh), etc. But, generally speaking, the aim is to establish an accurate conception of the individual’s stance on the issue in question, making sure to note any potential gaps in knowledge or qualities that stand out as particularly ripe for agitation. These gaps may include an ignorance of Palestinian history, American ties to Israel, or Israeli ties to imperialist efforts abroad. Ripe points of agitation may include intersecting issues (e.g., the role of co-opted queer liberatory rhetoric in Israeli propaganda), points of reference (e.g., Israeli settler-colonialism as compared to its American counterpart), or personally relatable phenomena (e.g., labor exploitation as seen in both the occupied territories and the United States political economy).

Such efforts will provide a clear portrait of the group’s relationship to said issue. With this layout in mind, subsequent organizing conversations and broader discussions of majority opinion can begin. The hope is that, as this process unfolds, group consciousness will gradually increase, previously unaddressed imperatives will become glaringly obvious, and collective action will inevitably form. From here, discussions to determine group-wide initiatives will become ever more commonplace, until they eventually culminate in a collective decision to pursue a democratically agreed-upon program. 

This organizational method embodies the full meaning of collective action where the reach of individualized initiatives falls short. It penetrates our existence as atomized subjects of imperial capitalism by forcing a collectivization of ideology, commitment, and praxis. It also creates a sociopolitical infrastructure through which we can continue to wield collective action going forward, whether it be for Palestine or for any other issue.

The engagement with the Palestinian cause we’ve seen from Americans in the last couple of months most definitely comprises a host of noteworthy waves, many of which have significantly toppled political affiliations and institutional prestige across sectors. But, now, only the embodiment of an organizational spirit by each and every one of us will do the work of constructing a tide — one that may just push us over the revolutionary edge into a world where Palestine is free, from the river to the sea. 


Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Salma Hamamy is a Palestinian student-activist and the president of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of Michigan, known as Students Allied for Freedom and Equality.

Immigrant Residents Move to Stop Coney Island Casino Bid

By Amir Khafagy


Republished from Documented NY.


Inside a small taco stand located in the heart of the Coney Island amusement district, a small but vocal group of community members gathered over a platter of tacos al pastor, to discuss how a proposed casino would affect their lives. 

“They will push us out and push local business out,” Jenny Hernandez, 30, said at the event. She has lived in Coney Island since she immigrated with her family from Mexico when she was a child. To her, a casino would destroy everything that she loves about her neighborhood. 

 “I love Coney Island and what I love the most about it is the diversity of nationalities that is here. I want it to stay that way and I want my kids to see all the nationalities.”

As the City wrestles with the possibility of opening the first-ever legally operated full-service casino within the five boroughs, two of the proposed sites are in the heart of working-class neighborhoods with large populations of immigrants. In Flushing, Steve Cohen, the billionaire owner of the Mets, is courting residents with “visioning” sessions that promise community members vast economic opportunities. Some residents in Queens have organized to oppose the project fearing that a casino would do more harm than good. 

Likewise in Coney Island, the developers and their supporters argue that the casino will be an economic boom for the community and will rejuvenate the iconic but aging boardwalk. However, a growing number of community members are pushing back, arguing that a casino would usher in a wave of gentrification that also destroys Coney Islands’ unique character. 

Over the past few years Coney Island’s skyline, once dominated by roller coasters, the Wonder Wheel, and the Parachute Jump tower, has seen the addition of several luxury high-rise apartment towers. Fearing a casino would only accelerate the pace of redevelopment, Hernandez decided to work with the United Front Against Displacement, an organization fighting public housing privation on Coney Island, to try to stop the casino effort.   

“We have seen all these high rises coming up in the community and that means gentrification is coming, but after I heard about the casino I said we have to do something about it,” she said. 

Hernandez is not alone in her opposition to the casino. In April, Coney Island’s Community Board 13 voted 23-8 against the casino project, citing concerns about a rise in crime and increased traffic congestion. Although community board ratings are only advisory and don’t have the power to kill the casino proposal, it is a bellwether of the community’s lack of enthusiasm for the project. 

Angela Kravtchenko, a Ukrainian-born community activist, and member of Community Board 13 voted against the project because she believes the casino is more trouble than it’s worth. 

“A casino won’t bring anything meaningful to our community, it only brings problems,” she said. “Do we want economic development? Sure we do, but there are so many other ways to achieve it.”

Councilmember Ari Kagan, whose district includes Coney Island, is opposed to the casino plan as well. 

“CM Kagan strongly and publicly opposes this project in Coney Island,” said Jeannine Cherichetti, his chief of staff.

According to Cherichetti, the Councilmember believes that the project would endanger public safety by increasing crime, increasing congestion, and causing mental health and gambling problems. 

Fears of an increase in gambling addiction and crime are not entirely unfounded. Although the connection between casinos and a rise in street crime is heavily debated, a 2006 study in The Review of Economics and Statistics found that over time casinos increased all crimes except murder. The study also found that casinos increased gambling addiction. 


Developers bet big on citywide support

Despite the local opposition, the consortium of developers, which includes real estate giant Thor Equities, Saratoga Casino Holdings, the Chickasaw Nation, and Legends Hospitality, has made a great effort to build local support for the massive project that has been dubbed ‘The Coney.” They have portrayed the $3 billion project as a potential economic engine for all of South Brooklyn that could generate 2,500 jobs with wages of up to $30 an hour.

The developers have also hired political consulting firm Red Horse Strategies to help with public relations. Red Horse has deep ties to Mayor Adams, with one of the firm’s partners, Katie Moore, served as his Campaign Manager as well as the Executive Director of his transition team.  

Thor Equities directed all questions to former Councilmember Robert Cornegy Jr., who represented Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights for 8 years. He was hired as a consultant by the developer in February.  

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Since being hired by the developers, Cornegy has led a team knocking on more than 16,300 doors and meeting people on the street to gather support for the project. Cornegy claims that he has collected 4,000 signatures in support of the casino. When asked if he is leveraging his past experience as a public servant for the benefit of private developers, Cornegy framed his support for the casino in altruistic terms. 

“My presence on this project is born out of my desire to continue doing the type of work I did when I was on the council as the chair of the small business and housing and buildings committees,” he said. “As a city, and more specifically in South Brooklyn, we must commit to an economic development agenda that is focused on creating large amounts of jobs and opportunities for all communities.”

Additionally, Cornegy insisted that the project would create thousands of good-paying union jobs, would deliver millions of dollars worth of infrastructure, and improve public safety. He also stressed that the project would be built with private funds and not displace a single unit of housing. Regarding the community board’s opposition to the project, Cornegy dismissed it. 

“Those efforts in talking to people directly are more significant than a preliminary non-binding vote by a divided community board who admitted they were making a decision on the project before the application was even finished,” he said. “They have charged that we would be paying our employees too much for them to qualify for public housing subsidies. We see it differently. We see the careers created by this project as a pathway to the middle class for people living in an area that is already experiencing high unemployment.”


Bureaucratic hurdles  

However, before the project can move forward it has to overcome several major hurdles. Currently, there are 11 casino proposals vying for just three coveted downstate casino licenses that the state has authorized. A convoluted web of governing bodies is overseeing the process and they will ultimately decide which proposal will be awarded a license. Ultimately, the New York State Gaming Commission will have the final say on whether a casino license will be issued, but before it even gets to that stage, the application first has to come under the review of the New York Gaming Facility Location Board which reports directly to Governor Hochul. 

The Board has the power to establish the licensing fees as well as the power to investigate every proposal. It will then select three candidates that will go before the gaming commission for final approval. Yet after a proposal is formally submitted to the board, the proposal has to first be approved by a Community Advisory Committee (CAC). 

In New York City, the CAC would be set up in each district in which a casino is proposed to be built and would be made up of six members representing the governor, the mayor, the borough president, the local state senator, the local state assembly member, and the local council member. Coney Island’s CAC vote is scheduled for October. CAC’s are required to hold public hearings and would need at least four votes to approve the project.

If that’s not complicated enough, one other major hurdle is the fact New York City zoning laws currently do not allow for casinos. Even if a project is awarded a license, there’s no guarantee that it would be approved through the city’s nearly year-long Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). 

According to Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, Mayor Adams’s Deputy Press Secretary, the mayor has not expressed a preference for any particular casino project. Regarding the potential obstacle the City’s current zoning laws pose for a potential casino, Lutvak pointed toward the mayor’s City of Yes for Economic Opportunity zoning proposal which would modify the city’s zoning law, making it easier for a project like a casino to be built. 

The current proposal to build a casino on Coney Island is not the first time developers had attempted to “revitalize” the boardwalk. In the late 1970s, developers eager to emulate Atlantic City, pushed for casino gambling on Coney Island. Anticipating a financial windfall, land speculation caused boardwalk real estate properties to rise from $3 to $100 per square foot.

Despite the backing of then-Mayor Ed Koch, the efforts were partly killed by Donald Trump who wanted to protect his gambling enterprises in Atlantic City. 

Now, to Jenny Hernandez, the current proposal feels like déjà vu. As a lifelong resident of Coney Island, she wants to see a future where the community takes the lead in shaping where they live. 

“Why do people who don’t live in Coney Island have a say on what happens in Coney Island?”

From the Trenches, This is How We Heal: A Discussion Between Frontline Protestors in Portland, Oregon

By Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn

Note from the authors: This collaboratively written article by two Portland protest community members, Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn, is the result of conversations we had after participating in protests, both as frontline protestors and as movement-side writers and journalists. Throughout the article, we switch font colors (Lexy in Red, Susan in Black) when we switch voices, offering two perspectives on healing and resistance. We hope that the processing we offer here can be a catalyst for our comrades here in Portland and for comrades worldwide who need to come together to do the work of sorting through it all to figure out how to heal and walk forward. Throughout the process of writing this article, we were both working 40 hours per week, parenting, and working on our own healing, while also continuing our resistance work. Thank you for expecting and accepting our imperfections. Thank you for noticing our strengths. Thank you for the blood you shed. Thank you for still being willing to walk forward and heal with us after you have already given so much. Thank you for the words you will have to add to this narrative. Thank you for the errors you see, the ways you disagree.


CONTEXT

[Lexy] Out of that storm of apocalyptic uncertainty and a slew of deeply traumatic collective traumas, back to back to back, one on top of the other, with no time to process any of it between, it was in the context, of that tense and highly turbulent climate with death and disease all around us, when somehow a sliver of light broke through. And with it a small shred of hope that we could finally tackle these issues of systemic racism and police brutality/accountability that have been so deadly and devastating to Black America and all other marginalized groups in this country for so long. Not just in our lifetime, but since it’s very conception.  

That tiny shred of hope, inside that sliver of light, shining through the pressure cracks of this outdated inequitable system, was enough to send ten million racial justice activists, abolitionists and lost souls, sprinting hard for those cracks of light to try and breakthrough the obstacles that kept them trapped all their lives. Obstacles and defenses that their oppressors had laid out for them, that they could now sense were in a weakened state, not as formidable as they once had been. Just that one shred of a possibility that we had a chance to disrupt the brutal and corrupt status quo of policing in America was enough to make us All go, All in. 

And now nearly two years later, with a long list of accomplishments juxtaposed by a long list of errors and setbacks, this movement stands at a whole new crossroads. Flustered and fragmented, but still standing...and still all in. Still, all that trauma changes a person, and this group in particular has been hit with a great deal of intensive trauma in a short period of time. And in this climate where just existing within the current state of the world is traumatic in itself, we may have to look back and resolve some of the traumas of our past and these last two years, to be able to move forward and forge ahead in building the more equitable world for our children and future generations. 

[Susan] It was that tiny shred of hope that drove us out of our homes, but for many a mass reckoning around white privilege was also a motivating factor. The geographic, social, and economic demographics of Portland, a city deemed 'The Whitest City in America', a city located in a state that was originally founded as a white supremacist utopia, a city also known for both Anarchist underpinnings and quirky white liberal Portlandia finickyness, was the only place where this could have happened exactly as it did. Portland was already known for massive protests. The history of protest in Portland in the past twenty years must be acknowledged as part of understanding how we got here. This historical recounting will not be perfect. It is non-academic. It is written in the cracks between work and mothering and street level protest. It is missing pieces that I hope others will fill in. Yet, it is written by a person who was right there involved in it and who saw it happen and also took part in those happenings. So take from it what is helpful and add to it what is missing.

Many of the protests of the early 2000s were active rejections of U.S. imperialism and furious responses to Bush agenda colonialism in the Middle East. Climate justice and its relationship to all of the above also drove people to the streets in those early years at the start of the century. By 2011, the Occupy Portland movement straddled adjacent two city parks in front of the Justice Center, which by no coincidence would become the heart center of the Black Lives Matter and Antifascist Movement of 2020/2021.

Human Rights organization Don't Shoot Portland must be credited with doing the work to shift the gaze inward toward white racism within the city of Portland through their ongoing activism and support of artistic production around police violence and murder of Black people, hyperpolicing of Black youth, and the history of racism in the state of Oregon and the city of Portland. Of course, dozens of Human Rights activists from many organizations spoke and protested prior to the rise of Don't Shoot as a trusted and reliable source of information, but we acknowledge the work of Don't Shoot due to their clear focus on exposing racism within Portland in the decades prior to the uprising of 2020 and 2021. This does not mean they were the organizer. As we say on the streets, Britney Spears is the organizer. We acknowledge the work of Don't Shoot PDX in order to highlight the consciousness and political energy-raising factors that preceeded the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing public response.

Likewise, the Occupy Ice Movement, supported by multiple antifascist  groups, Direct Action Alliance, several Antifa and mutual aid groups, and Portland DSA, in 2018, helped to focus the gaze of Portland protest community lenses around the intersection between colonialism, institutional oppression, race, and class. Occupy Ice was an immigrants rights movement, but also an indigenous rights movement, an anti-colonial movement, an anti-federal power movement, and an anarchist movement. One could enter from any of those invisible doors. Once inside, the rhetoric sparked discussions and even deep divides around race, class, gender, sexuality, protest, and organizing that bled right into the protests of 2020/21 through the veins of those of us who were involved in both. 

Decentralized leadership was operant in Occupy Ice (relevant becuase Occupy Ice was the largest, most recent anti-colonial and anti-racist movement in Portland prior to 2020/21). Some of the same expectations (not naming organizers, protecting Black and Indigenous voices) were the norm (or attempted norm) in 2020/21; however, in the 2020/21 movement, voices of Black women who wanted a movement that was truly intersectional (meaning centering Black women including trans women if you are really using Dr. Crenshaw's definition of intersectionality) were sometimes drowned out by the decentralized approach, and often they were still arrested, harassed, and targeted anyway. There were internal power struggles and ideological divisions among members of decentralized leadership that caused splintering. Within this reality, there was also the reality of thousands of high school students, most but not all who were white, with a lot of spare time on their hands and who were ready to roar. In identifying the youth protestors as majority white, it must be acknowledged that Black, Indigenous, Asian, and youth of multiple backgrounds, sometimes in leadership roles, did in fact hit the streets.. Bands of young people began to Bloc up for Black Lives Matter. Instagram handles told which park to meet at, how to Bloc up, how to make a shield, what to do if you were arrested.

Portland has a history of anarchist organizing. Reed College is purportedly an Anarchist institution (though that didn't seem the case when they kicked me off the grounds of Ren Faire just because I wasn't a student in 2001). As a non-Reed student who spent time with Anarchist Reedies at the turn of the century, I can tell you that this looked like a whole lot of dumpster diving, food sharing, zine-making, reading Anarchist literature, and punk rock music played in damp Portland basements. 

But Anarchism also lived outside of the academic nest that is Reed college. On Division street in the early 2000s, the Red & Black Cafe was a worker-owned coffee shop that was a center of Marxist and Anarchist thinking and activity. Pockets of Anarchism and anti-authoritarianism dwelled in little puddles around the city, often in the shape of young artists collectively renting buildings or houses to create underground galleries, hold metal shows basements, and hide in that space before big developer gentrification when housing was still cheap and working class artists could afford to hold paint brushes rather than shields.

That the throngs of white youth who showed up in 2020 were dubbed white Anarchist youth, however, was in part a mistake. As I’ve already established, the people who came out for the Portland Antifascist and BLM protests were not all white youth. The narrative that the protestors were all young white Anarchists is absurd. Many ethnic backgrounds and people who identify in many and multiple racial identities took part in all actions. There were and are many Black, Indigenous, and Asian people who are Anarchists or interested in Anarchist and Marxist philosophy living in Portland. Throughout the movement, local media created a divisive narrative in which they juxtaposed, “White Anarchists” with, “Black Lives Matter Protestors”. In doing so, they both erased the presence of Black, Indigenous, and Asian Anarchists, and inflated the lie that white or white appearing people on the streets were fighting for Anarchism, but not for Black Lives Matter.

That said, a hell of a lot of white youth who had not previously been politically engaged did, in fact, come out for the first time in 2020 and many came out under the banner, or shall we say umbrella, of Anarchism. Some had knowledge of the political philosophy due to the availability of antifascist and even Anarchist literature and ideologies in their own Portland homes (maybe some of their parents were once the Anarchist 20-somethings of the 90s and early 2000s). That knowledge likely grew through communication and pamphlets available at movement activities, but there were also white kids who had no knowledge of Anarchism other than how to tag the A and just wanted the chance to fuck shut up. And did.

Since decentralized leadership also meant that no single group or individual held the power, the rhetoric coming from megaphones and mics (which people just grabbed on a fairly regular basis) also ranged the full gamut of political underpinnings, from tacitly pledging allegiance to state power to Anarchistic direct action. City Council candidates who received donations from the PPB spoke at BLM children's marches on the same weekend that Black voices holding the megaphone at street-level protests shouted "Every city, every town, Burn the precinct to the ground," while marching through the night, surrounded by eager white youth. But I cannot speak on this as if I were an outsider listening in. Like many fellow protesters of a great variety of backgrounds, I was right there chanting too, motivated by the sincere belief that the police, criminal "justice" system, and the system of mass incarceration are indeed corrupt institutions that perpetuate racism, genocide, and harm to humanity.

Within the movement, there were common threads and hashtags. #wearenotamonolith became a commonly repeated explanation for serious ideological discrepancies in the movement used to normalize Black people not all having to share the same perspective because they are Black.

Another common thread was a constantly combusting discussion about the deeper meaning of Black Lives Matter and the need for whites to repair historic and ongoing wrongs. Fellow activists often questioned whether the very urgent and immediate daily focus on hitting individual Venmos or Cash Apps was in fact distracting the movement from the needed focus on demanding reparations for all Black and Indigenous Oregonians, through money and land that they deserve. This perspective did not intend to suggest that the aspects of the Revolution that operated through Venmo and Cash App were all the way wrong; the needs in the movement were and are real and these and other apps and mutual aid actions helped to address immediate needs and keep people housed and supported. The economic and personal needs that emerged in movement circles were also byproducts of apocalyptic capitalism and racism, and many needed urgent support so that organizers and protesters could keep doing the work or simply keep living, but this can be true while it could also be true that the movement can and will win more for those who are most impacted by demanding reparations from the city of Portland, the state of Oregon, and the Federal government.

A third common thread was respect for both decentralized leadership and diversity of tactics. Protest policing was widely eschewed, meaning it was not cool to tell anyone else how to protest, whether they were lighting a fire or silently meditating. Above all, it was essential to keep showing up. White people had the responsibility to listen, to front line if able, and to continue to disrupt white supremacy, especially in spaces where they (we) had privileged access due to race.  

Not far from the start, these demands were made by multiple members of decentralized leadership:

  • Defund and Abolish the Police

  • Fund the community

  • Make reparations for historic and ongoing racism in Oregon

Organization Unite Oregon followed up these demands with a detailed set of budget suggestions and actions for City Council and the Mayor (Fuck Ted Wheeler) to adopt. 

Some people marched with knowledge of what was on the table. Others marched for other reasons. Communication was imperfect. But in that chaotic context, the movement continued to multiply and subdivide. It continued to attract both sincere protestors and grifters. It's messages were both reproduced, surveilled, and tainted by fear or polluted by ego. We experienced infiltration by those with corporate protest agendas (groups who came down with the intention of soliciting votes or supporting particular agendas), politicians hoping to gain capital in every way they could through the opportunity to speak to large numbers, the FBI, and the Portland and Oregon State police.

Trusted voices emerged in the depths of street protest. Trusted voices emerged far away from stages, in parks, on street corners, behind umbrellas, faces hidden. Brief but historic conversations happened outside of precincts. There were moments where no microphone was present, but the truth was told.

Trusted political actors also emerged–people who were intentionally silent, unseen, acting on behalf of the movement. Firecrackers, yes, but also actions never to be heard, seen, or mentioned again. 

The movement felt scattered like gas canisters on the street after a Portland protest, yet furious, chaotic, unpredictable, and still on fire. 

[Lexy] After decades of dancing in denial over racist policies within the US justice system, it only ended up taking those three fateful words to expose nearly every closet racist in this entire country. Outside of the system and within, all the way up to the potus. After gaslighting Black America and our most marginalized communities for decades with false narratives that wealth inequality and poverty is based only on their own lack of merit, rather than lack of available resources or systemic racism, the racial justice protests of 2020/21 and the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement forced many white Americans to see and acknowledge the thinly veiled layers of white supremacy that permeate every aspect of this nation’s power structure, to finally face their own complacence and privilege within those frameworks. It did not take long for the bigots to come crawling out from the ideological muck and sludge like slugs after a fresh rain to tell Black America that they weren't allowed to say that their lives mattered. And when that same racist version of white America realized they could not control or suffocate this civil rights movement with their hate speech alone, it led to visible collective rage and a volatile response that reverberated through the far right and manifested itself in many episodes of right wing, neo nazi hate groups from out of state, invading the city, leading to frequent clashes with Homegrown Antifascists, who were forced into defending themselves and their homes. As writer Mark Bray reminds us, “Militant anti-fascism is inherently self-defense because of the historically documented violence that fascists pose, especially to marginalized people”.

Those of us on the ground in Portland that year were probably much less surprised and shocked than the rest of the nation when the events of the January 6th Capitol Riot transpired. The white American cis male bigot for far too long has been enabled and placated by the powers that be and they panicked and flailed and clung to their prejudiced ideoligies in a perverted carnival freakshow-like display of childish tantrum combined with the very real and extreme dangers of mob mentality, so its not a wonder that they literally trampled some of each other to death in the process. 

Meanwhile the organizers of mass protests on the far-left were diligent in creating measures for de-escalation, and touting chants like ‘we keep us safe’ or ‘we take care of us’, as a way of instilling safety measures into the minds and routines of the participants. Always keeping intersections blocked and barricaded from motorists who would use their cars as weapons against us during marches or demonstrations. Helping to ensure medics were in attendance at large rallies as well as ASL translators for accessibility. Food and water were always made accessible and provided for free, fueled by donations of supporters of the movement and dispersed by the efforts and labor of the community (shouts out to Riot Ribs in those early days). So much emphasis was placed on keeping our marches as safe as possible because we knew if we were going up against a violent system of injustice that imposes what’s seen as ‘law and order’ it was going to be dangerous and there would be disorder as a natural result and in the process people were going to get hurt. Seeing as police brutality was the very reason for this uprising in the first place, we inherently know how violent US policing is as an institution and if we stood firm against it, that violence was going to follow and some of our people were going to take wounds from the punches delivered by the violent right arm of the system we were all in to abolish or at the very least, bring a much stronger measure of accountability to. Nothing else would do and we could settle for nothing less, and so some windows would have to break, some precincts would have to burn, and worst of all some of our people would have to bleed before the needle could even start to move. But credit where credit is due, this community worked extremely hard to keep each other alive or from being seriously disfigured even in the most chaotic and lawless of circumstances. In the aftermath of clashes with neo nazis or 12, you’d always see comrades tend to each other’s wounds, carry each other to the closest available medic or wash the bear mace from each other’s eyes with saline. Assigning groups to walk injured comrades to safe houses or to take them to the hospital when it was necessary which wasn’t often with all the support we had from our heroic protest medics on the street level.

Work

[Susan] And yet we were workers. 

We were workers who held children on our hips. We were workers who did what we had to for tips. We were workers who loaded boxes at the supermarket in the middle of the night. We were Grub Hub, Burgerville, and food cart workers. We were librarians, social workers, and public school teachers. We were childcare workers, EMTs, artists, cannabis clerks. We were bus drivers, nurses, herbalists, students, and professors. We were retail workers, sex workers, and we were also great masses of unemployed workers. 

We were exhausted by day, fighting by night. We were willing to meet anytime anywhere to stand for what we knew was right. We changed out of uniforms, shook off the 8 hour shift. We arranged for childcare, some took turns with partners, so we could Bloc up and fight.

We met in the park at the place where race, class, gender, and human power flexed into a muscle that was The Revolution. For some of us, it was the Revolution we had seen up ahead and organized toward for years. For others, it would be the first time tasting the gas. 

We were both leaderless and guided by voices. We were both marching in the impeccable solidarity of the heart, and each needing to express that sacred rage that kept our feet marching when our souls were tired.

It was both always all for George Floyd (fly in power) and also for those shattered parts of each of us, dominated our whole lives by racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic authoritarianism that decided upon his death to scream our truths. It was always about Black Lives Matter, and it was also our biggest mistake to fail to admit that we were also doing it for ourselves. 

Here enters our trauma. Here our lies. Here our unspeakable truths. Here our addictions. Here our imprisonment. Here our egos. Here our fear. Here our fury. Here our failures. Here our demise.

The Battle of 1312 and the attempted federal occupation of an ‘Anarchist Jurisdiction’

[Lexy] And as we were clashing with each others egos in a constant battle of ideological motives that sometimes devolved into power struggles based on popularity contests or scene politics, what was most enlightening in all of that was the way all of that drama and toxicity and venom we were directing at each other would suddenly melt away and evaporate into the void the second the police came pushing down on us in their riot gear. And once again for the brief clash against the foot soldiers of our real oppressor, we all would be united as one against a common enemy we all could agree was one of the most glaring problems in our community looking right back at us, with eyes hungry for violence from behind those shielded helmets. Dressed in body armor, boots and state issued gas masks, the so called ‘peacekeepers’ were back to restore law and order from the ‘unruly mob’ who kept insisting that Black Lives Did in fact matter and had to be beaten, gassed, tazed, shot at and maced for saying so. 

But even if the police were itching to bash some heads, there was not a single night that the police truly wanted to be out there. On the flip side of that you better believe that those of us within the group they came to try and disperse wanted to be out there… Needed to be out there, if only to challenge the brutality of a state that desperately needed to be challenged, with the lives of our own community members hanging in the balance, especially BIPOC and those from marginalized communities. Endangered by the same police thug element we were fighting and those state issued .45 caliber handguns that they were always so quick to draw from out of the holster that hung on their hip. And in those moments, even with one of our leading mantras being ‘no gods, no masters’ we were almost always as close to one unified faction as we ever were and you would’ve had no idea that just five minutes earlier multiple people in that same group were at each other’s throats, about to come to blows over differences of opinion or petty squabbles. Such is the anger and hatred for the police and their masters to so many of us in the working class majority. 

The Battle of the Portland Police Association, June 30th, 2020

[Susan] Could there be a Love that was strong enough to win?

We met at Peninsula Park just before dusk. The rule “no whites on the microphone” in full effect, I remember playing the role of cleaning the mic for each speaker, one of whom was my partner, whose words illustrated the relationship between colonialism, racism, and police violence as the sky turned from grey to a shade of indigo above us. Numerous speakers took the mic before it was time to move as a collective to the precinct where we would stand outside and demonstrate our unified rejection of police violence toward Black and Indigenous people in this society. As we arrived at the precinct, we knew to expect police photographers to snap pictures of all of the speakers from the park. At this point, we knew they were always trying to surveil us, especially targeting Black and Indigenous people who had the courage to speak their minds at the microphone. For this reason, we had to be increasingly careful to avoid any actions other than expressing our right to Free Speech.

There was no “violence” that night, other than the violence of the police themselves. Just minutes after our march arrived (no fires, no broken windows, just people marching into the night speaking their minds and hearts) a blockade of heavily armed and shielded police marched toward us, their automated, authoritarian white male voice declaring our mobilization a riot and demanding we disperse. I heard only the voice of a Black woman--one of the women who was the first to the Justice Center upon the death of George Floyd, shouting, "Hold the Line!" into her megaphone right behind my head. 

My partner and I were that line right in front of her. Due to my racial privilege and ability, I knew I better not turn the fuck back now. 

In front of me was one thin line that included a bike activist who was holding their bike as a shield. Next to him was a deeply-committed but frail man I knew had a significant leg injury. To my left was my partner, a Puerto Rican man who I knew was also not turning back. 

"Hold the Fucking Line! We've got us!" she screamed again.

As the riot-gear clad police charged with their clubs out, I saw the bike get grabbed away, the frail man was lifted up and pushed back into us like a doll. I kept pushing forward until I felt myself choking on the gas. I felt my partner disappear into the front line battle with the police.

Choking, I felt a spray of pellets on my shins. People were running away behind me. There I was floating in the smoke, trying to regain my focus as I saw cops pinning people on the ground up ahead. I was fucking alone, about to get pinned, trying to locate my partner, who had run forward trying to get the fuming gas canisters away from the protestors. I struggled to see through my clouded goggles, stumbling, trying to walk, not run. 

In that moment in the smoky, dark of night, a woman I vaguely knew from Occupy Ice grabbed my arm, linked me, stabilized my path, and saved my ass. Never in my life have I believed more in Love. Never in my life have I found a greater sisterhood. She walked arm-in-arm with me in the smoke until my partner retreated from the front line and found us. As the police charged, we ran down a side street where everyone was dispersing. Running behind him, I saw that the police had shot him right toward the balls with green glow-in-the-dark paint. As we neared a dark corner near a dumpster, a blonde white male comrade who we had never met said to my partner, pulling out a pair of black Adidas running pants, "Dude, you're hit. Take these. Put them on over so they can't see you!"

My partner went behind the dumpster and quickly put them on.

Out on the residential side street where neighbors watched from their porches and driveways, we saw comrades strewn about like broken dolls, choking on the gas. Near our vehicle, which was fortunately on that street, a 6'2" blonde, early-20-something white man lay on the grass patch between the street and sidewalk crying and choking because he had been maced directly in the face by the police. We got water from our car and my partner helped him flush his face (milk was not available in that moment). His close comrades soon came to find him, help him up, and hobble him away.

We departed, needing to return for the babysitter. It wasn't until we got home that I saw the blood and the open wound beneath my partner's pants. It wasn't until the next day that we found out they were intentionally shooting Black and Indigenous men toward the balls. It wasn't until the next day that I realized my partner had helped a white man while he himself was injured and bleeding, but he was glad he did it, and in those moments and into forever, you better believe we learned what it means to be a comrade.

But this isn't intended to make a happy spectacle of our wounds. This is meant to offer a glimpse into one moment of police-induced trauma, to illustrate the pressure we were under throughout this protest period. 

Go home and kiss your child. Hug 'em tight. Get up and go to work. Black Lives Matter. The bruises will go away. End White Supremacy. Where does the pain go? Black Lives Matter. What is that noise in the night? What does it do to a person, facing police and military violence in bike helmets and science class goggles, homemade shields, and combat boots?

There are ways in which it made us way fucking stronger. Firstly, one of the greatest victories of the movement was won that night…and in the years that followed. Human Rights organization Don’t Shoot PDX proved that the munitions used on protestors were in fact illegal munitions. The lawsuit, which they won on behalf of our Free Speech, both documented exactly what happened, affirmed our right to Free Speech, and created a strong boundary to protect future protestors from illegal munitions like those that were used on us that night. We as a protest family thank Don’t Shoot for standing with all of us who were impacted by the munitions that night and every night. There is no way we could ever forget.

There are bonds created in those battles that can and never will die, but there are also ways in which the constant and continuous assault from the Portland Police and Federal Government systemically broke people and the movement the fuck down. And we cannot tie that up in ribbons and bows. We have to uncuff it, recognize the trauma, realize how it impacted us individually and as a collective, and move forward with both the wounds and the recognition that we are welded together by our sacrifices and our pain.

White Supremacy is Trauma

[Lexy] There were times things got a little out of control and times where it got downright out of hand. Just thinking back on some of it takes some pretty severe inner fortitude. Even though the police were always the instigators of actual violence against non violent demonstrators, there was a louder outcry from white Portlanders over the graffiti and boarded up windows, than they had ever shouted with, over the issue of police brutality. Whether it was a police killing of a BIPOC high school student or the beating of non violent protester, white liberal Portland never screamed or shouted about any of it with as much dismay as they did over statues of white racist colonizers getting knocked down on October 2020’s Indigenous day of rage (which the Oregonian intentionally mislabeled as simply the ‘Day of Rage’, leaving Indigenous out of the title completely in an obvious attempt to discredit the work done that night as wanton property damage and the work of white anarchists). Or the way they howled out their grief over the boarded-up windows and graffiti in the Pearl and other downtown shopping districts. And even though all that property damage was a symptom of the police brutality and systemic racism of the city’s failed power structure, it was still somehow the demonstrators who took the brunt of the criticism from liberal white Portland and the local media, who constantly portrayed us as the more militant side rather than as a resistance to militant policing. This city isn’t suddenly falling apart as the result of these protests. It’s coming apart from failed leadership, mismanagement of resources and the ongoing severity of the opiate epidemic and houseless crisis. The continued protests and unrest in this city are all secondary bi-products and consequences of militaristic, hyper-aggressive policing, inhumane rent increases, and heedless gentrification. The 2020/21 protests and unrest only applied the pressure and provided the clarity needed to magnify how badly this city’s leadership had failed their constituency. But someone had to be scapegoated for the city's own failures, to answer for all that graffiti and scattered glass on the streets. And to understand how to move forward from here we still have to dive deeper into our collective trauma to further understand how and why we got here, and why those windows had to break. Why and how those panes of glass that had once filled the windows of the banks, department stores, and office plazas of downtown Portland were being shattered as quickly as our country's own faith in itself.       

Where to even start with the list of all these combined traumas? They came back to back to back in a steady rapid stream. Compounded one on top of the other with little to zero time between to process any of it before the next disaster or crisis hit. A global pandemic and a state by state lockdown already had the world shaken and upside down. A Black Liberation and anti police brutality movement like we had never seen had swept the globe and racial justice activists took to the streets in huge numbers all across the US after the death of George Floyd, and as we’ve been discussing at length, our non-violent demonstrations were once again met with force and excessive brutality by police. The very bizarre political climate, and unrest in the streets prompted the Trump White House in conjunction with the federal government and department of homeland security to invade one of its own cities, Portland, OR which had become a kind of unofficial protest hub, and the atrocities piled up as a result, all seemingly for the agenda driven purposes of Trump admin optics leading up to a contentious election. And when the feds touched down and started snatching people up in unmarked cars, a couple hundred protesters suddenly turned into five thousand, igniting the spirit of the revolution into a group of people who were feeling less powerless by the second, riding high off of their collective civil disobedience, suddenly ready to stand up to the authoritarian abuses they had turned away from their whole lives but were now seeing on a terrifyingly heightened level.

The more they brutalized us it seemed the more people turned against the cops and the state, and the stronger we became as a group. More and more people would rally to our cause or put their support behind what they saw a glimmer of light and hope in us, while the world was growing darker and more unpredictable around them. Many of us had waited our whole lives for this moment and were more than ready to take up the call and throw our everything into it, but the sacrifices along the way were very real and some of our best and brightest were lost. 

Those of us who are still here were left with wounds that will take a lifetime to heal. From nightly clashes with the police and being subjected to their unhinged violence just for speaking up and standing firm in opposing their violence in the first place. From at least weekly clashes with armed white nationalists and/or neo nazis who were allied with the bureau. From the assassination of one of our comrades, which was openly plotted by the white house and carried out by US Marshalls according to the callous boasts of then president, donald trump himself. From the rampant nightly use of chemical warfare, LRAD and heavy crowd control munitions by police and DHS agents against non violent protesters, press, and bystanders alike. All the wildness that swirled around the eviction blockade/neighborhood occupation of our triumph over the Portland Police Bureau and wheeler admin at Red House (a Black and Indigenous family was scheduled to be evicted and their home taken, so comrades established a blockade and this became another central organizing site for the movement). The explosion of gun violence citywide and the continued police killings of unarmed houseless Portlanders on mental health calls. And the work, all the while, included always remaining aware of and confronting the continued violence and killings by the PPB and other bureaus in the nation against Black Americans and against our own houseless community. The list of internal and external traumas goes on and on and as we have already acknowledged, such traumas take a toll. 

[Susan] As fellow frontline protestors, we acknowledge the ways in which the trauma caused by interactions with the police like those described above injured comrades, both physically and emotionally. We also illustrate how the sheer pressure of the nightly uprisings against state and police power had many of us living in a frantic state of exhaustion. In this section, we also acknowledge the role that white supremacist thinking that walked into the movement inside of fellow white protestors corroded the movement like an invisible poison. We will identify and break down the ways that we saw elements of white supremacist thinking enter into Movement spaces and relationships to cause both disillusionment and the breakdown of important relationships between comrades. The processes identified below also caused the breaking off of many Movement visitors who were in fact not comrades, but individuals who eventually returned to their passive stance and did not continue the work of Movement building, Abolition, or deconstructing White Supremacy in society. Through examining these factors, we also identify aspects of the movement that were helpful and effective. We ask for understanding that these passages may not be comprehensive or complete. They are an attempt to expose what we understand some of what we know now to the light so that we can heal and further dialogue, and so that others can heal, converse, and add to the discussion in their own safe spaces.

Over time, it became clear that one common response to being traumatized by police, facing authority, and being under surveillance was to develop an attitude of paranoia toward fellow protesters, thereby redistributing police-induced trauma back into the movement. The movement clearly needs ways for participants to identify one another as comrades and to prevent infiltration by law enforcement. Unfortunately, police-induced trauma caused deep paranoia that impacted relationships between people who were in fact trustworthy, which helps police to achieve their goals and causes our Movement to falter. Cop Shit--shifting the focus from combating systems of oppression to surveillance attitudes toward comrades, is op shit. Op shit means those doing this paranoid trauma-induced work are in fact operating on behalf of the police and systems of oppression, not on behalf of the comrades. Cop shit & Op shit harmed the movement by planting distrust, and establishing feelings of distrust without clear systems to identify true commitment. In the worst form, this hyper-paranoia combined with people’s genuine anger or jealousy ( human emotions that regularly exist in groups if there are not means to process them) caused people to falsely claim that others were ops with the goal of destroying their platform or position. We acknowledge the role of capitalism and white supremacy in pre-teaching people to be competitive. We now see the import of exposing these factors, both for fellow whites and for any comrade who wants to examine the destructive role of white supremacy and perhaps to examine how these factors can show up as internalized racism as well.

It is also clearly known that a massive number of fellow white women came out for the movement in 2021. As a person who has been involved in Movement organizing for more than two decades, I noticed a phenomenon of clout and recognition seeking, features that literally came with white women who came out for the Movement with the best intentions. I do not exempt myself from seeking or receiving recognition nor self-promoting throughout my years in Movement. What differs is that facing my own racism led me to understand my recognition-seeking and develop systems of accountability in my own life and in Movement over decades. And guess what? I still have to look at that aspect of myself. I do not blame any person, raised in a white supremacist capitalist society, who enters all spaces seeking recognition or clout. That is what we are taught and the media, social media, capitalism constantly reinforce it. But the movement requires that a good part of our work is done anonymously. This anonymity is the deeper value of the very concept of Bloc. Bloc means we give up aspects of our identity for the Movement. Good Bloc--the total negation of personal identifiers--is rewarding because through it we achieve a deeper solidarity. The Movement doesn't and should not offer badges for Anarchist work. The tendency to try to re-create the girl scouts, to implement a system of hierarchy and rewards, was harmful to the movement because it caused people to chase the wrong results--selfish results, not movement results, name and social media recognition, even financial profits, not recognition for movement goals, media, not substantive messages.

Throughout the movement, we saw new "organizations" and non-profit organizations try to pop up. Suddenly, a person who literally just started protesting was the CEO of a new protest non-profit. For Movement veterans, this was hilarious and sad, an obvious admission of not being part of the movement at all. In Movement, we seek to deconstruct hierarchical structures. We view hierarchy as how white supremacy operates in society. When people attempt to establish hierarchies within Movement, they are reproducing white supremacy instead. Are we suggesting a deepening of annoying self-critical attitudes that can also be the demise of people’s attempts to experience their own power as people, organize, and create viable systems? Yikes. Overly critical attitudes are another dangerous part of the Portland Protest culture. Perhaps we can’t offer an answer here, but a question: How can we move forward with an awareness of hierarchy, competition, and recognition of aspects of white supremacist culture while also avoiding the harsh critical attitudes that mirror white paternalism?

As a member of a program of Recovery, I often wished that just one norm from Recovery, We Do Not Gossip, could become pervasive in the Movement. This part of the article does not pertain to any concerns regarding abuse, but to straight up gossip between people in the movement, unrelated to abuse or claims of abuse. Gossip is another way in which white supremacist ideology invaded the movement with a destructive outcome. Gossip was sometimes incited by paranoia, but it was also likely to walk right in with people claiming to be comrades. It wasn't just white women by any means...but it is an example of internalized white supremacy. Even when multiple people repeatedly tried to set boundaries with others in private conversations, many people simply do not see a difference between gossip and processing. Yet others used gossip intentionally to harm others and move forward their own agendas, thereby betraying the collective. Don’t get me wrong, processing is necessary and healthy! But hateful, vile comments, jealous remarks, and straight up lies invaded and destroyed crucial relationships. These behaviors caused harm and have no place in movement. From all of this we can identify the need to have stronger systems in place that keep us focused on collective Movement goals, expose and illustrate negative coping mechanisms that perpetuate white supremacy, while providing safe processing models for comrades.

The intention of this article, though, is not to become hypercritical of the Movement in a similarly damaging way. The point is to demonstrate the practice of self-analysis and to promote the idea that collective self-reflection and basic communication between comrades must be operant in order for us to win. While factors came in that damaged the Movement and impeded progress, there were also beautiful wins, effective strategies,  and triumphant moments of coming together.

Specifically, the use of public parks as meeting spaces, throughout the entire movement, was one of the most successful organizing strategies. For the most part, the people of Portland know our public parks better than the police who don't live here. Normalizing the practice of meeting at parks was one of the most enduring and powerful organizing strategies. In many cases, a microphone or space was opened for anyone who needed to communicate. The downside of meeting in the dark at parks in bloc was that it is easy for outsiders to infiltrate. The upsides are the creative use of public space, the use of indigenous land to organize against state domination (especially when Indigenous voices were centered), the availability of hiding spaces, the safety of open air venues, and the space for open communication between comrades.

The deepening of Mutual Aid systems is another beautiful aspect that emerged throughout this time period. Dozens of gardeners, medicine makers, food sourcers, shield makers, and medics came together to both protest and provide supports for comrades at parks prior to marching and at the street level. At one point, comrades had an actual ambulance that was painted and re-purposed as a movement-side ambulance. It was parked near the protests and staffed with actual movement-side medical professionals. Networks of mutual aid (including UMAN (United Mutual Aid Network) which we co-operate with comrades, still continue to operate today. Mutual Aid networks, even if they seem to only focus on one very specific aspect (like food, or herbs, or shields) are essential to long-term sustainability of the movement as a whole because they are also places where we can move information, step up and step back, yet stay connected and continue to organize for the battles to come.

[Lexy] Jail support was an example of one of the thriving support networks that was set up and operated by community members and has been one of the most essential resources and support services to activists on the ground throughout the timeline of this uprising as well. In some ways it was one of the glues that held us together. Organizers and community members would roam the crowds at any given protest shouting “jail support” and writing the phone number on the bodies of any activists who wanted it in ball point pen (since the police would confiscate your phone and belongings, the number had to be penned somewhere on your skin), for a direct link to bail funds or lawyers. In almost any case any activist that was taken in for a targeted arrest during a protest, you could call that number for ‘jail support’ written on the back of your hand or sideways on your arm and get your bail posted as soon as you were eligible. It was a great support to the racial justice activists on the ground but still those trips in and out of jail left lasting scars on many of us, as well. 

Our best shields and protectors on the front line were as fearless as they were relentless, and as a result of some of their selfless heroics they took the heaviest burden of those targeted beatings and arrests at the hands of hyper-aggressive, heavily armed and armored riot police. As being caged up and treated like a stray animal will make just about anyone feel dehumanized or less than, it was also the resulting court cases, probation and legal fallout from those arrests that became consuming enough to make many frontliners have to walk away. And then there was the deceptive deputization of Portland and state police as federal agents as an extra protest deterrent. So even if the charges were dropped by local and state authorities, they would most often get picked up again and revisited by the feds, making for an already tedious and exhaustive process of getting your name cleared at least twice as long. But many never wavered no matter how many times they got hauled in, beaten or arrested. Some as many as a dozen times over the course of the unrest so far. I remember one of my frontline comrades and I laughing together about how everyone who worked nights at Inverness, in Multnomah County Jail booking knew their info by face and name on sight from so many recent repeat visits.

So while there has been property damage, rioting and lawlessness on certain occasions, more often than not our resistance was organized, non violent, and more mindfully structured than many (including myself) would’ve ever believed possible in such a decentralized movement. That sustainability is attributed to the intensive amount of labor, effort and shared resources put in by our organizers, BIPOC leadership and our community members. 

This happened with protest communities across the country as well, as they banded themselves together to create mutual aid networks and support systems for the movement, to provide for themselves and their communities what the state was not. Without this, our ongoing collective resistance to these police killings would’ve fallen apart and unraveled quickly and never grown to be the largest, most mobilized civil rights movement in the history of this country.

And in the process of attempting and succeeding on most levels to create order in the midst of disorder, we proved that we can replace everything the system and its institutions have ever given us, from medical attention, to public safety, food and even shelter, all by our own means without the support of the state or from corporate institutions. And we also proved, the powers that be are helpless against our organized resistance, when we are unified and working together, towards a specific goal or purpose. We were successful in swiftly chasing the feds out of town. We placed constant pressure on the Portland police bureau, which continues to splinter under the weight of a mass exodus of sudden retirees and resignations. And there is the victory of our defensive stand and neighborhood occupation at Red House keeping it in the Kinney family's possession, even against all the city's forces trying to push them out. These are some of the most glaring examples of that collective power over the span of 2020/21 uprising. Now it’s time to finish the job. 

And as we find ourselves transitioning out of one chaotic and tumultuous year and into the unpredictability of what 2022 will bring, we find ourselves at this busy unmarked intersection of inbetweens and uncertainties, bumbling through haphazardly. On top of the trauma we’ve endured in the movement, we’ve also lost so many people in the last year and a half. Not just from this virus directly but also from the illnesses that went untreated because of it. The thousands of addicts who overdosed or lost their housing and stability due to relapse when the support groups and resources they relied on for their recovery evaporated in a puff of smoke, as the whole world shut down. The upsurge in white nationalist terrorism. The explosion of violent crime rates and gun violence as a result of  unemployment, desperation and overall instability. We’ve lost so many in such a short amount of time. Just existing in this present reality is utterly exhausting. And we still have to contend with going back to work or school to pretend as if everything is business as usual, even as the world and system we’ve lived within is burning down all around us.   

Existing within this climate is fraying our nerves and those who haven’t completely totally lost their shit are displaying an immense amount of inner strength and resilience. I’m not sure how to find the balance between self care and the relentless mindfulness it takes to keep our sanity through this gauntlet. All I do know is that acknowledging your vulnerabilities and addressing your own fears, anxieties and insecurities is more courageous than charging through it while pretending nothing is wrong and projecting a false image of strength. As our comrades are constantly reminding each other... hyper-independence is also its own trauma response. 

[Susan] As I meditate on how to close this process of reflection, I am on the mend from a three week take-down by Covid. I am glad to be alive, but also grateful that I will not fail to exhale the virus into this article. For while we fought, we also experienced the pressure to risk our lives in order to operate capitalism. While we fought, some comrades needed soup and zinc while others needed pain balm to take away the sting of pepper bullets and bruises of police batons. We know that Latin American, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and Black comrades and family members faced illness and losses at the highest rates. Covid did not level the playing field or end racism, but it did enlighten millions of workers to the deeper reality of our own exploitation. The spiritual, psychological, emotional, economic, and geo-political outcomes of this endless layer of pain and suffering that impacts comrades globally cannot yet be predicted. But we do know that people are quitting their jobs in record numbers. We do know that a great reckoning with capitalism and its multi-layered systems of oppression is part of how we heal. 

To suggest that we have all of the answers, or even any specific answers for healing the nuanced individual pain of others, is ludicris. To suggest that maybe, our process of using our relationship as comrades, as well as our creativity, to do the ongoing work of discussing and healing our trauma is a form of mutual aid that could benefit the movement long term, feels true.

It is true that access to counselors, addiction recovery resources, and medicines (all of which also need to be examined for and healed of white supremacist, capitalist culture) will be needed to heal the damage caused by the carceral state, the police, and the capitalist system that pays white supremacy. Yet, it can also be true that some needed answers will not be found under the rubric of professional mental health services. If we are talking about Revolution, we need to have the courage to look beyond the healing modalities offered up by the system. 

For the Movement to fully realize our potential, priority must be placed on creating safe access to healing. This doesn't mean accepting the deeply colonial medical "care" system as it is. It means utilizing perspectives on healing that include, at their inception and in the way they function, the common goal of overthrowing systems of oppression. Witchcraft, Brujeria, Santoria, Espiritismo, Anti-racist pre-colonial Celtic spiritual practices, and Indigenous healing traditions are excellent directions to look in, but we must simultaneously learn about and work on our own healing, yet avoid appropriation and look back in the direction of our own heritages rather than invading spaces that do not belong to us. Creating music, art, literature, and rituals that help us to process our losses as individuals and micro-societies will be essential to understand and transmute our pain. To build a movement that heals, we must work beyond the physical realm while seeking healing in our emotional and spiritual selves. The harm is everywhere. The answers differ for each of us, but if we can walk forward accepting that holding one another through our withdrawals, through our revelations, through our betrayals, and through our small wins is as important as linking arms and holding space against the tear gas, we have a fighting chance.

[Lexy] So how do we continue the work in the meantime and cope? At our own pace. With our own coping skills and knowledge of self. By monitoring our inner dialogue and respecting our self care practices. Through self love and acceptance. But first through acknowledging the depth of our experiences and how they've impacted us. And it’s important to note that while this is the story of our collective trauma, all of us on the ground still have our own individual sets of physical and psychological trauma we endured throughout the course of these events that we will all have to heal from in our own ways, time and through our own processes. 

We have to stay in lockstep with each other more than ever with the current upsurge in recruiting and organization of white nationalist hate groups and far right militias. With the system unraveling in front of our eyes more everyday, the lines have been drawn and the side that is more pacifist will likely be the losing side. The police and the state have nothing to gain from defeating white supremacy, their power is predicated on it, after all. We are the only real shield against the rising tide of fascism and white nationalists in this country. And we’re all going through this as one, even while so many forces are trying to divide us. Those who care about others have to stick together like never before right now. Speak kindly and gently to yourself and if you catch your demons poisoning your inner monologue, check that bitch. You deserve all the credit in the world for standing up and keeping it together when so many others are content and complacent to look the other way and function only out of their own self interest. Hold your loved ones closely and focus on building community. With No gods and No masters, we gotta stay together and we gotta stay tight. 

South Station (Albany, NY) Occupation Ends in Community Brutalization

By Canyon Ryan

After the murder of Duante Wright in Minneapolis, the same city where the Derek Chauvin trial  was taking place, several protests developed in Albany in the ensuing days. The first march was small, held late Sunday night and sparsely attended. The following Monday night, a crowd of approximately thirty marched down Lark Street and surrounding areas before occupying the five-intersection corner of Madison Avenue and Lark Street. Tuesday, to my knowledge, was quiet. 

But the calm all but subsided in the daylight of Wednesday, April 14, when the Albany Police Department (APD) responded to a gathering of protesters at their South Station with typical unwarranted force. Lieutenant Devin J. Anderson “swatted” a megaphone held by a black woman to the extent that he gouged her teeth into her upper lip; and the police subsequently pepper sprayed everyone in the same proximity, including a 14 year old black girl, before huddling back into the station. 

The protest momentarily fractured before reconvening at the same location with dozens of new people standing in solidarity. With the police in hiding, a safe space developed for organizers and activists alike to commensurate and discuss their dissatisfaction with the rate of progress the U.S. has been making in “police reform” since the George Floyd uprisings of 2020. It was decided days later that organizers associated with the Black Lives Matter movement would occupy the South Station precinct until several demands were met.

First, they called for the termination of Lt. Anderson due to the force he displayed against the freedom fighters that Wednesday. It was also later discovered that Anderson has had multiple legal cases brought against him by the Albany community, including one case in which he and other officers conducted several anal cavity searches before allegedly planting crack on a man. 

The second demand was for Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan and Chief of Police Eric Hawkins to come to the South Station with press live-streaming and speak directly with the occupiers about their grievances. The significance of the “live” element of this demanded meeting was related to Sheehan and Hawkins releasing edited video to the press of protesters yelling at the police and kicking in the window to the Station’s front door. This edited footage did not include any police provocation, and was used to defend Sheehan’s inappropriate accusation that the April 14 BLM demonstrators were similar to the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (she later retracted this comparison in a non-apology apology), an assertion Hawkins agreed with. Their third demand was for a database where APD records could be easily accessed.

Six days later, no demands had been met. The City and Chief defended Anderson’s right to the force while painting occupiers as violent. In reality, the occupation was a multi-racial real utopia, where people from all walks of life congregated, much to the dismay of Albany City and their police. Homeless, disabled, Black, white, Native, Latinx and others built controlled fires, developed a tent complex and ate food brought to them by the community. Nightly gatherings took place, occupiers and sympathizers drew on the police station with chalk, heaters were set up-- it was a sincere display of multi-racial solidarity. Collections began for distribution to the homeless and houseless community in Albany, for distribution that Wednesday. But on April 22, around 3pm and before any distribution had begun, the riot geared police moved in. 

Against the people, swarms of City agents attacked a small group of occupiers, dragging them across the cold pavement, beating Black men, women and non-binary persons to the ground before cuffing them and hauling them into the station. 8 people were arrested, the encampment was destroyed with Albany Department of General Services assistance, sidewalks once covered with slogans of popular hopes and disdain for police brutality wiped away, and all gathered goods brought to organizers by the community and distributed to the community were burned by the City goon squad. The police would remain in riot gear, protecting an empty street and sanitized building until after midnight. 

The safe space constructed by the people, for the people, was erased in less than six hours by a police department unwilling to compromise with the people. Beholden to their foundation, in the name of rounding up Black bodies, white supremacy and capitalism, the police brutalized Black people in the street only to stand that same space in the following hours with riot shields as the community gathered around them. In the 30 degree weather, police were treated with shift changes every 30-45 minutes while protesters stood in the cold, warmed only by the solidarity of their community. 

In the end, what remained of our project that day was all but demolished by thugs in uniform protecting a barricaded empty street. A crowd of 80 stood on the opposite side of guardrails established by the police, while shift-changing riot squads of 9-15 stood on the other like Palace guards. The thin blue line of silence permeated the air that night, as the police refused to even as much as acknowledge the affliction and suffering brought to the community by their presence.

Many of those arrested today were back on the frontlines once released. For those detained through the night, we know from their commitment to the struggle that had they been released, they would have physically been there with us too. But we also know that those detained were indeed with our collection that, in deep spiritual solidarity against the forms of oppression seated and financed in our City. We will be back at South Station, to reclaim the streets which are rightfully ours. No amount of second-degree rioting, disorderly conduct and obstruction of governmental administration charges can stop the movement of the people. Scare and smear tactics hold no power nor judgement over our commitment to justice. 

 

Canyon Ryan is a member of the Socialist Party USA National Committee, the Capital District Socialist Party and Capital District United Left Front.

Voting Doesn't Beat the Far Right

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

The Far Right, emboldened and egged on by Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol Building yesterday with little resistance from the police. Their occupation of the Capitol — which came while Congress was in session ratifying the electoral college vote — is a far cry from the tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests which took place during the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But, this isn’t too surprising: we’ve always known that the cops will treat the Right with kid gloves and even aid and abet them, just like we saw during last year’s anti-lockdown protests and in Charlottesville. What these mobilizations reveal is, once again, that voting and elections won’t defeat the Far Right — especially not when the alternative is the Democratic Party, a capitalist party that helped fuel its rise. 

During the 2020 presidential election, figures from Barack Obama to Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis were telling everyone who would listen that voting for Joe Biden was necessary because it would defeat the Far Right forces that Trump has been stoking for more than four years. Many members of the Left bought into this argument and voted for Biden against their better judgement because they wanted to put a stop to Trump’s authoritarian and right-wing tendencies. In some sense, this is understandable — after all, if Trump is the one emboldening this right-wing movement, why wouldn’t getting rid of him help kill it? The events that transpired over the last few days clearly show that this is mistaken thinking. Whether in the White House or out of it, Donald Trump and his far right-wing base will continue to mobilize and play a role on the political stage. In fact, a staggering 75 percent of Republicans believe that the elections were rigged, highlighting the widespread influence of Trumpism. It is naïve to believe that these folks will just go home on January 20th.

Further, the idea that elections can defeat Trumpism misses  that politicians can’t create movements in a vacuum — they tap into existing sentiments and give political expression to them. The global rise in right-wing extremism is a response to the dire conditions created by the economic crisis. The current spike is a more direct result of the decline in living conditions for ordinary Americans over the past few decades, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, which the capitalists resolved by implementing devastating austerity that robbed millions of social services, education, job opportunities, and health care. This created a deep polarization which had left- and right-wing populist expressions. 

In this context, right-wing extremism emerged because it spoke to the despair of (typically) white men. By tapping into the racism that capitalism is built on, right-wing extremism channels anger at the establishment and converts material struggles into xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism. And Donald Trump was the political expression of this right-wing polarization, strengthening, giving voice to it, and, now, mobilizing it on a larger scale. This movement rallied around Trump because it believed that he represented a challenge to the established order and, now that he has been defeated by yet another neoliberal, it is mobilizing to defend him. 

But we should be clear: this rise in right-wing radicalization is a product of the Obama years as well as the escalation in the Trump years. Given this, it is not only incorrect but deeply dangerous to think that Biden’s warmed-over neoliberalism in the midst of a devastating economic crisis will do anything but escalate the problem.

Indeed, the escalations from the right that we saw on Wednesday come less than 24 hours after the Democrats won both senate elections in Georgia and took control of Congress. Trump was defeated at the ballot box in November and then again in January, but the social base of Trumpism is emboldened, not diminished. With Trump out of office, it provides him with a bigger platform to speak to this right-wing base, not smaller, because he will no longer be held back by having to work within the established structures. The “adults in the room” are gone, and full-fledged right-wing populism can reign at Trump rallies, on Trump’s Twitter feed, and the vast network of right-wing media outlets. 

So if the solution to defeating the Right isn’t voting for the Democrats, what is? 

The way to defeat the organized Right is with an organized Left independent of all capitalist parties. There are no shortcuts, no substitutes for the organizing we need to do. We need to build powerful and militant worker organizations in our workplaces and in the streets that can resist the Far Right, all the politicians who cater to them, and the neoliberal austerity that creates them. This resistance will involve both openly confronting the Far Right in the streets but also using our power as workers to resist them. For example, workers in DC could go on strike to protest the Far Right occupation of the Capitol building, forcing the government to evict them from the streets.

Strong Left organizations are also important because they can fight back the ideological advance of the Right. Many young people are drawn to the Far Right because they believe that it offers solutions to their struggles. If there were Left organizations that were putting forward a strong message against both the Far Right and neoliberalism, it could help to prevent some of these people from being drawn into right-wing extremism, thus preventing these movements from growing. It is vital in the fight to defeat the Right that we provide a real and meaningful alternative. And for people who become fascists, we agree with Trotsky when he said, “If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.”

In this, the failure of leftist leaders like Chomsky and Davis becomes clear: not only were they wrong that defeating Trump at the polls would defeat the Far Right, but they also sewed false illusions in Biden. Chomsky and the other leftist leaders who asked us to support Biden told us that he could keep us safe from the Far Right. He can’t — and he won’t. By funneling the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement into support for Biden, these leaders intentionally or not worked to undermine what could have been the foundations of the type of mass social movement we need to protect against the Far Right. Voting for Biden got us further away from defeating the Right, not closer.

History is littered with examples of this. From Franco in Spain to Hitler in Germany, the liberals always choose to side with the fascists over the socialists because fascism is less of a threat to the capitalist order than socialism is. So we can’t be fooled when liberal politicians wring their hands about the rise of the Far Right — they aren’t on our side, and we cannot support them in their elections, even when they are running against a representative of the Far Right. Liberal victories at the voting booth will not defeat the Right — but class struggle and worker organizing will. And given the right-wing mobilization yesterday, it’s clear that we need independent organizing in the current moment. 

The Fascist Farce on Washington

By Josh Lees

Republished from Red Flag.

Far right protesters forced their way into the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to support Donald Trump’s failed attempt to cling to a second presidential term in the face of his election defeat. Many people, from across the political spectrum, labelled the event a coup, or an insurrection. It is the exact threat, apparently, that the pro-Biden establishment and the major US TV networks have been warning about: a major attack on US democracy.

But far from some serious “coup” or “insurrection”, this was a pathetic display highlighting the weakness of Trump and the right. The outgoing president won 74 million votes in November. He has spent nine weeks campaigning to overturn the election result. The rally in Washington was supposed to be the culmination of these efforts. Trump urged his supporters to attend the rally and he spoke at it. Yet the turnout could be counted only in the thousands. The rally was a flop—the “popular” equivalent of a Rudy Giuliani press conference.

Trump failed to win any institutional support for his bid. No section of the military has backed him, nor any other section of the US state apparatus. He has lost every court case filed. Fox News has distanced itself, along with the bulk of the Republican Party establishment. Even those, like Senator Ted Cruz, who objected to accepting the electoral college votes from Arizona, made clear that they were not trying to prevent a Biden presidency. Even Trump’s closest political allies seem to have abandoned him, while they nevertheless try to hang on to his supporters. Trump failed to mobilise any serious numbers on the streets and eventually called on them to go home.

The “storming” of the Capitol was hardly the stuff movies are made about (although I’m sure someone will try). A few windows were broken, and the only person killed was one of the far-right protesters. No real damage to the building was done. Someone sat in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chair (the horror!). To call it a riot is generous. Perhaps “theatre” would be a better word.

Their success in gaining entry had more to do with the sympathy that the cops and other security agencies have with the far right than the protesters’ actual strength. While Black Lives Matter protests have been met with thousands upon thousands of riot police and the National Guard, tear gas, flashbang grenades, beatings, mass arrest and shootings, the fascists were met with very few cops, some of whom took selfies with the protesters as they wandered around not really knowing what to do now that they had miraculously gained entry.

We should be clear: the US state backs Biden. Besides their sympathy with the far right, this is the other reason the security apparatus was unprepared for the protesters entering the building—authorities knew that there was no coup, so they were quite relaxed. They will be ruing that it got out of hand—but in the same way all police departments are embarrassed when a protest gets out of their control when they weren’t expecting it. In the wake of the protest, Trump, having encouraged his supporters, is now more isolated than ever. 

The pathetic death-throes of his presidency does not of course mean that the far right in the US is finished. It is much weaker than the Democrats make it out to be (to cynically herd the broad left into supporting their right-wing corporate candidates). But it has certainly grown under Trump. It may grow into a more serious force still. Even if the far right doesn’t grow, its isolation and demoralisation could push some in its ranks in the direction of terrorism, as we saw with the wave of fascist shootings in the wake of successful anti-fascist mobilisations following Charlottesville. So there is a need to build movements against fascism in the US, and it would be great if there were mass protests in the coming days in response.

But a myopic focus on the far right is misorienting—a result of the highly successful campaign by the US liberal establishment to focus on Trumpism as a unique threat to the working class and people of colour, and ignore the structural features of US capitalism that the Democrats uphold and against which so many rebelled in 2020.For the last four years we heard that it was the Democrats versus fascism. Perhaps that broken record is going to play for a little while longer, albeit while the Democrats control the executive and both branches of the legislature.

The main political outcome of the far-right farce in Washington is likely to be a strengthening of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party and an attempt to use these events to rally the population around all the key institutions of US capitalism and imperialism that have copped such a battering in recent times.

The US ruling class and its state apparatus backed a Democrat presidency to better “rebuild trust” in US institutions, “unite the nation”—i.e., co-opt and crush internal resistance—and rebuild US imperial might abroad. The Democrats agree with the bulk of Trump’s policies and have often legislated worse themselves, from neoliberal attacks on workers, to racist border policies, killer cops and launching or backing wars. Hence why they have opposed Trump as an aberration—a result of Russian interference and the uneducated “deplorables” who fell for his fake news—who is weakening and dividing their otherwise wonderful country and its institutions. Biden is the saviour to, essentially, make America great again.

The main enemy in the US remains the US state, US capitalism and the new imperial presidency of Joe Biden and his Democratic majority. The more liberal wing of the Democrats is doing its best, as it has all along, to play the role of herding left-wing opinion behind Joe Biden. 

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, celebrated hero of “the squad” among the pro-Democrat left, responded to the events by tweeting, “We will not let our Constitution be trampled on by a mob and threatened by a tyrant. Democracy will prevail”. This is nationalist blather. She and her fellow squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have now called for Trump to be impeached, a laughable manoeuvre to keep the focus off the incoming Biden administration.

You would be hard-pressed to come up with a duo who more personify everything that is rotten about capitalism than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. One has spent his life getting rich off a political career based on campaigning to lock up as many of the poor and people of colour as possible. The other has carried out that agenda as the top cop of California. They are loyal servants of the rich and enemies of the working class, and their key mission is to strengthen the bloodiest empire the world has ever suffered. We cannot forget this amid the breathless talk of imagined coups by small fascist groups.

Blows Against the Empire—2020 In Memoriam

By Steve Lalla

To say that 2020 has been memorable would be an understatement, but experience teaches us that our memories of the pandemic may well be struck from the record.

“The 1918 influenza epidemic is one of history’s great conundrums, obliterated from the consciousness of historians,” wrote Gina Kolata, and COVID-19 may yet meet the same fate.[1] Kolata recalls that not only was the Spanish flu omitted from basic history in her elementary and high school, but was also ignored in microbiology and virology courses in college, even though it killed more people than the first world war.

From the onset of the pandemic it was clear that it would accelerate the crumble of the u.s empire. Many had commented on the fragility of neoliberalism in the face of public health crises, and it was pretty obvious from the start that the imperialist system would prove incapable of handling COVID-19 in a reasonable manner.

While the u.s and its capitalist vassals fell prey to COVID-19, blaming it on China or insisting that “one day, like a miracle, it will disappear,” the pandemic overshadowed imperialist defeats in the Middle East and Latin America, and masked some of the scariest climate catastrophes in recorded history.

A chronology of 2020’s most salient dates:

 

January 5: Iraq’s parliament voted to expel all u.s troops from the country. Deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Units of Iraq, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, was assassinated in a January 3 drone strike—in addition to Iran’s General Soleimani—the last straw for Iraq politicians’ toleration of any u.s troops on their soil. About 5,000 u.s troops remain in the country. The ruling was the final blow to Bush Jr.’s lie that the Iraq War would “bring freedom” to Iraqis, who instead revile the u.s for killing a million of their brothers and sisters, destroying their economy and infrastructure, and bombing their most precious ancient sites.

January 6: Millions filled the streets of Tehran, Iran, following the drone killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani. Widely publicized footage of astounding mourning processions contradicted u.s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s hollow boasts: “We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom, freedom to have the opportunity for success and prosperity for their nations. While the political leadership may not want that, the people in these nations will demand it.” Coupled with the late-2019 u.s retreat in Syria, it became clear that the empire was losing their war against the Shia Crescent.

January-February: Early in the new year raging forest fires in Australia grabbed world attention. Fires incinerated over 45 million acres and caused almost 500 deaths, either directly or as a result of smoke inhalation. Ecologists estimated that over one billion mammals, birds and reptiles were killed, including about eight thousand koalas. Climate change and destruction of the environment, spurred by decades of conspicuous consumption and a dependence on fossil fuels, are the results of an anarchic capitalist economic system that profits from waste and obsolescence. The u.s produces over 30 percent of the planet’s waste but holds about 4 percent of world population, a profligate lifestyle they imagine can be exported globally.   

March 10: China announces victory in the struggle against the COVID-19 virus. To date, they’ve reported one death and a handful of cases since mid-April. Following strong measures to combat the pandemic including mandatory lockdowns and mask use, antibacterial dousing of public spaces, contact tracing, and regulating travel, China emerged as the global leader in pandemic defense. As a result China represents the one significant national economy that didn’t slump in 2020 and the world’s “only major growth engine,” according to Bloomberg. They dealt an additional blow to imperialism by sending doctors and equipment to the rescue of NATO countries, notably Italy, France, and Spain, or to stalwart u.s allies such as Brazil, Indonesia or the Philippines, in addition to helping numerous resistance nations including Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and African nations such as Algeria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, or Zimbabwe.

April 6: Prominent right-wing political figures and news sources shared the story that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had died of COVID-19. In reality Nicaragua had recorded only one death. Camera-shy Ortega made a rare televised speech on April 15th denouncing the u.s empire for spending trillions of dollars on bombs and war but refusing to provide basic free health care for their people. By December, the u.s death rate for COVID-19 was 40 times that of Nicaragua. 

April 20: A blitz of news regarding the death of Kim Jong-un filled all mainstream media. With the pandemic claiming lives around the world this story became huge. Unsurprisingly the lie originated with media funded by the u.s regime-change operation National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

May 3: Venezuelan fishermen foiled the Operation Gideon armed invasion led by former green berets employed by private security company Silvercorp. In March trump placed a $15 million bounty on Maduro, with predictable results. Following the arrest and confession of Silvercorp founder Jordan Goudreau, we learned that u.s officials and their Venezuelan puppets juan guaidó and leopoldo lópez planned and funded the attack. Goudreau even presented documents to prove it. Eight mercenaries were killed, seventeen were captured. The photo of prostrate commandos in front of the Casa of Socialist Fishermen was cited as one of the year’s best.

May 24: Anti-imperialist nations, locked out of world markets by u.s sanctions, were starting to team up. On this day Iranian oil tankers, escorted by boats, helicopters and planes of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) of Venezuela, broke the blockade and landed in El Palito.

May 25: The public lynching of George Floyd horrified the world. In the middle of the street, in broad daylight, while being filmed, a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes, until Floyd breathed no more. One of over 1,000 murders by u.s police in 2020, Floyd’s killing sparked massive spontaneous protests across the u.s in every city and town. Widespread arson and looting occurred and an army of live streamers shared daily demos, speeches, and police brutality, for those at home. The protests raged for months and had many peaks. The empire deployed the National Guard, military helicopters, and by July were using unidentified troops in black vans to kidnap protesters. At least 14,000 civilians were arrested, and 19 killed, in the protests.

May 28: Protestors torched the Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct police headquarters, where George Floyd’s killer worked. Police forces had fled the building. The incendiary images provided some of the year’s most widely shared and beloved photographs.

May 31: u.s president trump was taken to a fortified bunker as thousands of protestors besieged the White House and threatened his life. Eventually the empire’s security forces established a perimeter around the president’s residence, with multiple layers of fencing, and fought a pitched battle with bottle-throwing protestors for weeks on end.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/trump-bunker-george-floyd-protests

June 3: Cristobal makes landfall in Louisiana, the first of a record-breaking five named storms to hit the state in 2020. Lake Charles, a city that held almost 80,000 people, immortalized in The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek,” will never recover. Over 45,000 homes were damaged, insured losses topped $10 billion, and thousands of residents are still displaced.

June 20: After tweeting that “almost one million people requested tickets for the Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!" trump spoke to only 6,000 supporters and over 13,000 empty seats. He was trolled by K-Pop fans and teens on Tik Tok who had bought up all the tickets and created fake hype around the event. Photos of a dejected trump leaving the rally were wildly popular.

August 19: Out-of-control California wildfires began to gain international media attention. By this day over 350 fires were already burning. The state went on to record over nine thousand fires, burning about 4 percent of the state’s land, by far the worst wildfire season in California’s history. The smoke from the fires, which are still burning, will create a miniature nuclear winter, contributing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the cars, cities and industries in the u.s during an entire year, and release energy equivalent to “hundreds of hydrogen bombs.”

October 6: Enormous protests erupted across Indonesia in the wake of the government’s passing of an Omnibus Law that undermines workers’ rights and the environment. The law was enacted November 3; protests are ongoing and have resulted in the arrest of at least six thousand civilians including 18 journalists.

October 13: In recognition of their success in maintaining the “highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights,” both Cuba and China were elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

October 18: Luis Arce, candidate of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), swept into power by trouncing Carlos Mesa in Bolivia’s presidential election, gaining 55 percent of the vote to Mesa’s 28 percent. The results put the lie to claims by u.s-backed Organization of American States (OAS) that the 2019 elections, in which Evo Morales was elected to a new term, were fraudulent. Arce’s election vindicated those who had argued for a year that Morales was deposed in an illegitimate, u.s-sponsored coup. Coup dictator jeanine añez and her coterie of imperialist supporters were panned worldwide. añez was captured trying to flee the country while other offending politicians, such as Minister of the Interior arturo murillo, and Minister of Defense fernando lopez, escaped.

October 25: In response to gigantic demonstrations that began in October, 2019 and still haven’t let up, Chile held a Constitutional Referendum. The main objectives of the ongoing protest movement are the removal of president piñera and of the pinochet Constitution that made Chile “ground zero” for the failed neoliberal experiment. To date over 2,500 Chileans have been injured, almost three thousand arrested, and 29 killed in the protests. In the October 25 referendum 80 percent voted for a new constitution, and chose to have it drafted by a Constituent Assembly elected by the people.

November 3: trump’s loss in the u.s presidential elections wasn’t really a defeat for imperialism because biden’s regime will prove to be just as bad, or worse,  for targets of the empire.

Nevertheless, it felt like a victory for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because trump embodied outright neo-fascism and was supported by the most reactionary, racist yankees. Secondly, because, following his electoral defeat, trump and his entourage resorted to every possible ruse that CIA regime-change operations have employed in other countries for decades: crying fraud, attacking voting centers, and denouncing imaginary communists. “trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other u.s leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf. “The latest example was him calling the u.s elections a fraud. With that he made it impossible to undermine the elections in Venezuela.”

November 11: Evo Morales returned to Bolivia exactly one year to the day after his ouster. His return was celebrated by multitudes, and hailed as a “world historic event.” Morales assumed his place as head of MAS and as an eminent spokesperson against imperialism.

November 23: While u.s reported their largest increase in poverty since they began tracking data, China announced that they had lifted all counties out of poverty, and eradicated extreme poverty across the Republic. Since 1978 China has lifted over 850 million out of poverty, according to the World Bank.

November 25: Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla revealed links between members of the San Isidro movement and the u.s embassy in Havana. The failed San Isidro campaign revolved around Cuban rapper Denis Solis, detained in Havana for failing to respect COVID-19 regulations and assaulting a police officer. A small group went on a highly publicized "hunger strike" demanding his release and claiming that Cuba was repressing dissent. Meanwhile Cuba's government and investigative journalists revealed the ties, including funding and numerous meetings, between San Isidro group members, Miami-based right-wing agitators and u.s politicians in Cuba. The rapper in question, Denis Solis, didn't help his case by yelling "trump 2020!" at Cuban police officers in a video he filmed and shared himself a few days after trump had lost the election.

November 26: Over 250 million took to the streets in India, reported as the “biggest organized strike in human history,” protesting new laws that will attack farm workers and subject the nation to inequitable neoliberal doctrines. Huge masses of demonstrators marched on Delhi from neighboring states. They met barricades, roadblocks, armed security forces, teargas and all manner of obstructions, but dismantled everything and reached their target. "They are trying to give away agriculture to capitalists, just like they sold so many of our important public sector companies across India," said a spokesperson. "Through this relentless privatization they want to further exploit farmers and workers."

December 6: Venezuela’s Parliamentary Election resulted in a landslide victory for Maduro’s Chavista party PSUV/GPP, breaking a deadlock in Parliament that had lasted for five years, and ushering in a new era in Venezuelan politics that will last until the end of Maduro’s term in 2024—barring a military invasion, assassination or successful coup by imperialist powers.

The upcoming year certainly holds more of the same in store for us: embarrassments for imperialism, hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths, and a doubling-down on capitalism’s claims that it provides the only way forward, evidenced by the hubris of promotional efforts for The Great Reset.

 

 

Notes

[1] Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Uprising, Counterinsurgency, and Civil War: Understanding the Rise of the Paramilitary Right

By Tom Nomad

Republished from Crimethinc.

In this analysis, Tom Nomad presents an account of the rise of the contemporary far right, tracing the emergence of a worldview based in conspiracy theories and white grievance politics and scrutinizing the function that it serves protecting the state. Along the way, he describes how liberal counterinsurgency strategies function alongside the heavy-handed “law and order” strategies, concluding with a discussion of what the far right mean by civil war.

Tom Nomad is an organizer based in the Rust Belt and the author of The Master’s Tools: Warfare and Insurgent Possibility and Toward an Army of Ghosts.

The bulk of this text was composed in September and October 2020, when the George Floyd uprising was still unfolding and many people feared that Trump would try to hold on to the presidency by any means necessary. Since then, the uprising has lost momentum and the Trump administration has failed to organize a seizure of power.

Yet the dynamics described herein persist. The uprising remains latent, waiting to re-emerge onto the streets, while the formation of a new MAGA coalition is underway. Since the election, a constellation including the pro-Trump right, conspiracy theorists, the remnants of the alt-right, and traditional white nationalist groups has formed around a belated attempt to keep Trump in power.

This coalition is motivated by conspiracy theories and narratives about Democrats “stealing” the election. An additional segment of the American voting population has connected with the far right, openly calling for their opponents to be eliminated by violent means. This is not just a new right-wing coalition, but a force with the ability to leverage AM radio, cable news, and elected officials to spread racism, xenophobia, and weaponized disinformation.

Trump and his supporters will be removed from office shortly, but this coalition will persist for years to come. While centrist media outlets described Trump as seeking to seize power, his supporters see themselves as acting to defend the “real” America. In response to Trump’s removal from power, they aim to work with the “loyal” elements of the state—chiefly right-wing politicians and police—to eliminate what they consider an internal threat to the US political project. At its foundation, the right remains a force of counterinsurgency.

Introduction

The events of the George Floyd uprising represent something fundamentally different from the convulsions of the preceding twenty years. The normalities of activism, the structures of discursive engagement premised on dialogue with the state, gave way; their hegemony over political action began to crumble before our eyes. The mass mobilizations—with their staid, boring formats, their pacifist actions with no plan for escalation, their constant repetition of the same faces in the same groups—were replaced by a young, radical crowd largely comprised of people of color, willing not only to challenge the state, but also to fight back. Over a period of months, the previous barriers of political identity evaporated—the constructs that distinguished “activism” from “normal life.” This new force ripped open the streets themselves, leaving the shells of burned police cars in its wake.

For some of us, this was a long time coming. The global influence of the US has been in decline since the end of the Cold War; the post-political era that Fukuyama and Clinton proclaimed so confidently has given way to a history that continues to unfold unstoppably. The war that the police wage against us every day finally became a struggle with more than one antagonist. The long anticipated uprising, the moment of reckoning with the bloody past of the American political project, seemed to be at hand. We saw the state beginning to fray at the edges, losing its capacity to maintain control. While we cannot yet see a light at the end, we have at least finally entered the tunnel—the trajectory that will lead us towards the conflicts that will prove decisive.

But, just as quickly as this new momentum emerged, we were immediately beset on all sides by the forces of counterinsurgency. The logic of the revolt is constantly under attack, sometimes by those we had counted as allies. Some insist that we must present clear reformist demands, while others aim simply to eliminate us. All the techniques at the disposal of the state and its attendant political classes—including those within the so-called movement—are engaged as our adversaries endeavor to capture the energy of the struggle or exploit it for their own gain.

From the first days, liberal organizers played a core role in this attempt to bring the revolt back within the structures of governance. Caught off guard, they immediately began a campaign to delegitimize the violence expressed in the streets by framing it as the work of provocateurs and “outside agitators.” They progressed to trying to capture the momentum and discourse of the movement, forcing the discussion about how to destroy the police back into a discussion about budgets and electoral politics. Now, as Joe Biden gets his footing, liberals have completed this trajectory, arguing that rioting is not a form of “protest” and that the full weight of the state should be brought to bear on those who stepped outside of the limits of state-mediated politics.

The truth is that the revolts of 2020 represent a direct response to the failures of former attempts at liberal capture. During the uprisings of 2014 and 2015, liberals were able to seize control and force the discussion back to the subject of police reform. Consent decrees were implemented across the country; so-called community policing (a euphemism for using the community to assist the police in attacking it) and promises of legislative reform effectively drove a wedge between militants and activists. These attempts delayed the inevitable explosions that we have witnessed since the murder of George Floyd, but they were stopgap measures bound to fail. The current revolt confirms that reformism has not addressed the problem of policing. The areas of the country that have seen the most violent clashes are almost all cities run by Democrats, in which reform was tried and failed. In some ways, the narrative advanced by the Trump campaign that cities are in revolt due to Democratic administrations is true—but it is not as a consequence of their permissiveness, but rather of the failure of their attempt to co-opt the energy of revolt.

At the same time, we are experiencing a new attempt to supplement state forces with the forces of the far right. Militia groups that previously claimed to be opposed to government repression are now mobilizing their own informal counterinsurgency campaigns. This is not surprising, given that these militias were always grounded in preserving white supremacy. It is also unsurprising that more traditional Republicans have allowed themselves to be pulled in this direction—ever since September 11, 2001, their entire ethos has been built around the idea that they are the only people willing to defend the “homeland” from outside threats.

Yet it is surprising the lengths to which the state is willing to go to accomplish this goal. Traditionally, the basis of the state has been a set of logistical forces able to impose the will of a sovereign; in America, that sovereign is liberal democracy itself. The continuation of this project is directly tied to the state’s ability to function in space, logistically and tactically; this requires spaces to be “smooth,” predictable, and without resistance or escalation, both of which can cause contingent effects that disrupt state actors’ ability to predict dynamics and deploy accordingly. In calling for para-state forces to confront the forces of revolt in the street, Trump and his colleagues are setting the stage for a conflagration that—if all sides embrace it—could lead to large-scale social conflict. Their willingness to embrace such a risky strategy suggests how near the state has been pushed to losing control. It also indicates the ways that they are willing to modify their counterinsurgency strategy.

The revolt is now under siege. The official state forces—the police, federal forces, National Guard, and the like—are employing a strategy of consistent escalation, which functions both as retaliation and repression. The forces of liberal capture have showed which side they are on, affirming Biden’s promise to crush the militant sectors of the uprising and reward the moderate elements. The forces of the right have received approval to generalize the “strategy of tension” approach that they developed in Portland in the years since 2016. When these newly anointed forces of right-wing reactionary para-militarism are incorporated into an already existing patchwork of counterinsurgency-based approaches, the scene is set for a scenario that can only end in mass repression or mass resistance, and likely both.

The emergence of these converging counterinsurgency strategies has coincided with a rising discourse of civil war. This is not the sort of civil war discussed in texts like Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War, which describes, in hyperbolic terms, a conflict between different “forms of life.” Civil war, as understood in the modern US context, is a widespread frontal conflict between social forces that involves the participation of the state but also takes place apart from it. The idea that this could somehow resolve the core social and political differences emerges from a millenarian vision structured around American civilian militarization, which has emerged in response to the so-called “War on Terrorism,” the realities of social division within the US, and the rising perception of threats, whether real (people of color dealing with the police) or imaginary (“rioters are coming to burn the suburbs”). Though many on all sides embrace this concept, this fundamentally shifts our understandings of strategy, politics, and the conflict itself.

We should be cautious about embracing this concept of civil war; we should seek to understand the implications first. The framework of civil war might feel like an accurate way to describe our situation. It can feel cathartic to use this term to describe a situation that has become so tense. But embracing this concept and basing our mode of engagement on it could unleash dynamics that would not only put us in a profoundly disadvantageous situation, tactically speaking, but could also threaten to destroy the gains of the uprising itself.

Before we can delve into why this is the case, we must review how the framework itself emerged. To do so, we need to go back to the middle of the 20th century.

The Origins of the Push towards Civil War

To consider what civil war could mean in contemporary America, we have to understand how we got here. We have to tell the story of how white supremacy shifted from being identical with the functioning of the state itself to become a quality that distinguishes the vigilante from the state, on a formal level, while operating directly in concert with the state. What we are tracing here is not a history, in the sense of a chronicle of past events, but rather a sort of genealogy of concepts and frameworks.

We’ll start with the shift in political and social dynamics that took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the Civil Rights Movement. Resistance to hegemonic white power began to impact two fundamental elements of white American life during this period: the concept of American exceptionalism—the idea that America is a uniquely just expression of universal human values—and the notion of a hegemonic white power structure. This led to a shift in the ways that white, conservative groups viewed the world. They felt their hegemony to be newly under threat, not only in regard to their control of political institutions, but also in ways that could erode their economic and social power.

Previously, in many places, police had worked hand in hand with vigilante groups like the KKK to maintain racial apartheid. The day-to-day work of maintaining this political structure was largely carried out by official forces, with the underlying social and economic support of a large part of the white population. For example, during the racist massacre that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, many of the white assailants were deputized and given weapons by city officials.

During the fight for civil rights in the 1960s, when the role of the state in the enforcement of white supremacy began to shift in some places, many white residents adopted an active rather than passive posture in supporting the racist aspects of the social order. As resistance reached a critical mass, the issue of racial segregation became openly political, rather than unspoken and implicit, with entire political platforms structured around positions regarding it. In response to the challenge to the hegemony of the white apartheid state, the structure of apartheid came to the surface, and white Southerners enlisted in openly racist political forces on a scale not seen since at least the 1930s. These shifts and the subsequent widespread social response created the political and social conditions for the dynamics we see today.

During that period, the discourse of white supremacy also changed form. As oppressed populations rose up with increasing militancy, the narrative of unchallenged white supremacy gave way to a new narrative grounded in an idyllic portrayal of white Christian America and a promise to construct racial and economic unity around an effort to regain power and restore the “lost” America. This narrative, articulated by politicians like George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, and later Ronald Reagan (and distilled today in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”), was not just a call to preserve white supremacy. Rather, it described an ontological conflict in which the attempt to overthrow Jim Crow and bring an end to structural disparities represented a threat not only to an economic and social structure, but also to white America itself. Further, it proposed that this threat necessitated a response employing informal violence, mobilized across a wide swath of society, with the consent of the state. This narrative portrayed the emerging social conflict, not as a conflict about race and politics, but as an existential struggle, a matter of life and death.

In some circles, the demand for a political and social unity for white America was framed in terms of “civilization”—this is the current from which the contemporary far right emerged. As Leonard Zeskind argues, this shift involved embracing the concepts of “Western civilization,” the need to defend it, and the incorporation of fascist and Nazi tropes into the thinking of the far right. Many of the personalities who were to drive a militant shift in the far right—David Duke, Willis Carto, William Pierce, and others like them—began to publish newsletters and books, finding a home in the world of gun shows and obscure radio programs. This shift, from white populations taking their political and social domination for granted to white populations reacting to a perceived loss of hegemony, also contributed to the rise of armed right-wing groups. The idea of defending Western civilization provided a moralistic framework and a justification for violence, leading to groups like The Order carrying out armed robberies and assassinations during the 1970s and 1980s.

In more mainstream Republican circles, these ideas of the idyllic America and its civilizational superiority became policy positions, though they were expressed only in coded terms. By the time of the 1992 George HW Bush re-election campaign, it was no longer possible to leverage overt racism within polite society the way it had previously been. As a result, the right began to frame this discourse in new terms, speaking of “Western” values and civilization, describing a “real” America defending the world against Communism and disorder, which were implicitly associated with racial and political difference. In place of people like Duke or Wallace articulating overt calls for racial segregation, the right began to use a different discourse to call for separation on the basis of the concepts of purity and deviance and the language of law and order.

This served to define a cultural and political space and also the areas of exclusion—not on the basis of overt concepts of race, but around the idea of a civilizational difference. The terms of division were sometimes framed through the lens of religious differences, other times through the lens of a gulf between a rural and an “urban” America. Some within the right at this time, like Lee Atwater, discussed this shift overtly with their supporters (though behind closed doors), articulating how “dog whistle” policies on tax, housing, and crime could serve as replacements for the overt racism of the past. This concept of a Western civilization under threat fused with the fervor against “communism” that was revived under Reagan in the 1980s, along with rising conspiracy theory discourse—a toxic mixture that would explode, literally and figuratively, in the late 1980s.

Meanwhile, the rise of the religious right as a political force added another element to this fusion of conspiracy theories, anti-communist paranoia, and the increasingly armed politics of white grievance. Prior to the Reagan campaign in 1980, the religious right had largely approached politics with suspicion, with some pastors telling their parishioners not to participate in a political system that was dirty and sinful. The Reagan campaign intentionally reached out to this segment of the population, shifting its campaign rhetoric to attract their support and elevating their concerns into the realm of policy. Consequently, anti-choice campaigns and the like became a powerful means to mobilize people. This gave the narrative of social polarization an additional moral and religious angle, using rhetoric about sin and preventing “depravity.” The result was an escalation into armed violence, with the Army of God murdering doctors and bombing abortion clinics around the US.

In this move toward armed violence, right-wing terrorist discourse underwent a few modifications. The first of these was an expansion of the terrain where they saw the “war” being fought. The tendency towards armed violence expanded from focusing on civil rights initiatives and the question of whether marginalized groups should be able to participate in society to sectors that had traditionally considered themselves distinct from overt fascism. As the mainstream right increasingly embraced the concept of the culture wars, they also adopted the implication that there was a fundamental existential conflict. By framing the conflict in terms of purity and deviance, coupled with the idea of civilizational conflict that was already emerging in the right, the construction of an absolute social division around political power came to justify a rising discourse of armed politics. Right-wing attention was concentrated on those who did not share right-wing moral codes; this was framed as a justification to use state violence (in the form of legal restrictions, such as abortion bans) and armed force (in the form of far-right terrorism) to eliminate all groups perceived as threats to moral American life.

In addition to targeting people who were pro-choice, who had different religious affiliations, or who expressed themselves outside of the cis-hetero normative construct, these perceived threats were also directed at non-white people, though this was framed in the language of responding to social and political deviance. The idea of an armed cultural conflict, the targets of which now included everyone outside of white Christian conservatism, began to spread throughout the right wing, as some of the more moderate factions embraced or at least explained away anti-choice violence or the formation of militia groups. However, as the violence became a more significant political liability, conservative politicians began to modify the extremist rhetoric of armed factions into policy, embracing the culture of these political circles while rejecting armed violence, at least in public. This was evident in anti-choice politics, in which politicians embraced groups like Right to Life but rejected groups like the Army of God even as they incorporated their political rhetoric into policy.

The development of this broad political identity based in white Christianity and the attempt to restore and protect an idyllic America from all “outside forces” brought the discourse of far-right organizations into increasingly mainstream contexts starting in the early 1990s. However, while their ideas were becoming more and more generalized, armed far-right groups became increasingly isolated, especially as the Gulf War precipitated rising mainstream patriotism. As allegiance to the state became a default politics on the right, armed violence was increasingly seen as fringe terrorism. In some ways, during this period, the right no longer needed the armed groups, since it held almost unchallenged power, and could implement far-right visions incrementally through policy.

During this period of right-wing ascendancy and lasting until the election of Clinton in 1992, the armed far right became publicly ostracized from the mainstream right, which increasingly saw the indiscretion of the far-right as a liability. Increasingly marginalized, far-right fringe elements kept to themselves, breeding an ecosystem of conspiracy theories dispersed via newsletters, pamphlets, books, and radio. However, with the rise of the Clinton administration and the loss of Republican power in Congress, far-right beliefs were slowly reintegrated into the mainstream right. Publications like American Spectator magazine picked up fringe conspiracy theories from the far right about the Clintons’ financial dealings, the deaths of their former friends and business associates, and Bill Clinton’s supposed ties to moderate left-wing activists during the Vietnam War (never mind that he was an informant while at Oxford). This process accelerated after the government raids at Waco, which were portrayed by many on the right as an attack against a religious community over gun ownership issues, and at Ruby Ridge, portrayed as a state assault on a rural family minding their own business.

The events that played out at Waco and Ruby Ridge, early in the Clinton administration, began to play a role of being points of condensation around which conspiracy theories could form. The efforts to establish global unity under American political norms, which arose at the end of the Cold War, accelerated the emergence of narratives about a purported New World Order—a superficially modified version of some of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that the Nazis had previously advanced. Combined with the narrative of an absolute cultural and political division, this fueled perceptions that the “traditional” America that the right wing held up as an ideal was collapsing. Elements of the racist far-right used these conspiracy theories as openings to enter mainstream right wing circles. Mainstream Republican discourse integrated the former fringes—a move propelled by Newt Gingrich and Thomas DeLay for the purposes of creating a permanent Republican voting block; by pushing the narrative of permanent division and existential threat, they could demonize the Democrats, guaranteeing loyalty among their voters. The popularization of these narratives extended the Overton window to the right in ways that the far-right subsequently exploited to extend its influence and recruitment. Many of these tendencies fuel present-day Trumpism.

Concurrently, in the 1990s, militia movements that had previously been viewed as fringe elements increasingly came to be regarded as necessary to defend America from internal and external enemies. As right-wing conspiracy theories reached a fever pitch and increasingly mainstream Republicans embraced these politics, the militias grew in size. This tendency, coupled with the right’s historic fervor for gun culture, popularized the notion of the “patriot” standing up against “tyranny” to preserve “freedom” and an American (read: white-dominated) way of life. This language was continuously weaponized over the following decades, pulling more moderate conservatives into contact with extreme right-wing ideas, which became less and less divergent from the language of mainstream Republican activists.

Understandings of “freedom” as the preservation of white domination and Christian supremacy continued to infiltrate the mainstream right, fueled by the conspiracy theories about how Clinton was going to destroy the white Christian way of life in America. In this mutation, the concept of “freedom” was modified to represent a rigid set of social norms. For example, Christian groups began to declare that it was a violation of their “freedom” for the state to allow non-hetero couples to marry, or not to force children to pray in school. In the past 30 years, this dynamic has been repeatedly applied to exclude people from society based on sexual orientation or gender identity and to further integrate the language of Christianity into government documents. This notion of “freedom” as the “preservation” of a “way of life” has become so popular with the right-wing that it barely requires repeating when politicians employ it to push policies of exclusion. Combined with the desire to eliminate difference and to preserve social and political inequality, disempowerment, and racial apartheid, the notion of “freedom” has been stripped of any actual meaning. This has set the stage for an increasingly authoritarian posture across the right.

The concept of a culture war, which had become common parlance within the religious right, fused with the widespread conspiracy theory narrative describing the rise of a tyrannical elite. In its attempts to undercut Clinton, the Republican Party created the conditions for a concept of total cultural warfare, which became increasingly militarized and seeped back into the more moderate factions of the Republican Party. Some of these factions still embraced policy-centric positions, but the narratives they utilized to motivate voters were all based on this notion of an absolute cultural threat. Voters were presented en masse with the image of an American culture threatened with extinction, led to believe that they were the only forces that could mobilize against a tyrannical “liberal elite” in order to preserve their “freedom.” As this mentality generalized, the idea of civil war as a horizontal conflict between social factions came to be widely accepted among the right.

The Mentality of Defending the “Homeland”

With the advent of the second Bush administration and the September 11 attacks, the relationship between the state and the fringe far right changed dramatically. The state’s response focused on constructing a national consensus around the “War on Terrorism”—a consensus which was exploited to justify systematic violations of civil liberties, to target entire communities, and to channel trillions into overseas military occupations. The core of this campaign was the construction of a narrative of two elements in conflict (“with us or against us”)—a binary distinction grounded in unquestioning loyalty to the state—and the drafting of the “public” into the intelligence and counter-terrorism apparatuses. The attacks themselves and the rhetoric around them helped to popularize the concept of a conflict of civilizations; the idea of defending the “homeland” from foreign threats that sought to “destroy the American way of life” was increasingly adopted across the American political landscape. A sort of renaissance occurred in the militia movement: no longer alienated from the state, the militia movement started to become a cultural phenomenon. The concept of the citizen defender of the “homeland” entered popular culture, becoming a widespread cultural archetype within mainstream conservatism.

The embrace of the tenets that formed the foundations of the militia movement in the decade leading up to September 11 had profound effects.

First, an ecosystem of conspiracy theories developed around September 11, propelling Alex Jones from the fringe towards mainstream conservative circles. This was bolstered by state efforts to spread the narrative that hidden enemies within the US were waiting for a time to attack. This posture lends itself to justifying social exclusion and validating conspiracy theories; the threat is not apparent but hidden, associated with elements of society that diverge from supposed social norms. As a result, the narrative on the far-right shifted from a framework that was at odds with the state to a framework in which the right targeted others based on race, religion, and politics in order to defend the state itself. Conspiracy theorists were able to exploit increasing Internet use, using online media and the newly formed mass social media platforms—chiefly Facebook—to spread conspiracy theories to new social circles.

Second, the incorporation of far-right ideas and personalities into mainstream conservative discourse brought more traditional conservatives into increasingly close contact with extreme racism and Islamophobia. Before the rise of social media and the right-wing idea of the civilian soldier, many people saw these conspiracy theories as marginal and lacking credibility, or else did not encounter them in the first place. But now, these fringe elements gained an audience within more mainstream circles, hiding their intentions within the parlance of counter-terrorism. As the field of counter-terrorism studies emerged, many of those who initially populated that world hailed from the Islamophobic far right; they were able to pass themselves off as “terrorism experts” simply by presenting themselves as a “think tank” and making business cards. As the right came to adopt the concept of an absolute threat and to identify that threat with otherness in general, the fear of an immediate terrorist threat that politicians had propagated bled over into cultural and political divisions, conveying the sense that the enemy represented an immediate and physical threat to health and safety. The more this mentality spread throughout the right, and the more that this was leveraged to demonize difference, the more the conditions were created for these divisions to be characterized with a narrative of overt warfare.

For more and more Republicans, inclusion in society became conditional, depending on political beliefs; protest activity was enough to identify a person as an external enemy. This is ironic, insofar as the right wing has dishonestly sought to rebrand itself as defending free speech.

Within the right, as the idea of a militarized defense of the state against enemies both internal and external took shape, the definition of “enemy” expanded to include not just those of different cultural, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, but also immigrants, Muslims, and “liberals.” As the Bush era wore on, this newly empowered militia movement, increasingly aligned with the white nationalist agenda, began to engage in semi-sanctioned activity, such as the Minutemen patrols along the Mexican border. Republican politicians incorporated the ideals of these militarized groups into GOP policy, both nationally and locally in places like Arizona, where white nationalists played critical roles in drafting SB1070, and later helped to popularize a narrative about the need for a border wall. Following the patterns of past social conflicts, this narrative served to create political conditions that could render increasingly invasive state policies more acceptable and successful—including the expansion of the surveillance state, the militarization of the police, and the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As militarism took hold on the right, the foundations of the contemporary conservative position were laid. The right came to see themselves as defenders of the state, and the state as the force that defends their “freedom”—understanding “freedom” as the preservation of a white Christian conservative society. Consequently, formerly anti-government militias shifted to openly supporting repressive government intervention, and even the supposedly “libertarian” elements of the right embraced the police and the forces of the state.

When Obama took office, the stage was set for the final act, in which the politics of white grievance, the violent preservation of white supremacy, and what would become a state strategy of counterinsurgency came together in a volatile cocktail. Just as they had during the Clinton era, Republican politicians began to capitalize on racism and conspiracy theories as political strategies to regain power—but this time, these conspiracy theories took on overtly racial and religious tones. What had been implicit in the 1990s was now explicit.

The prevalence of conspiracy theories within the Republican Party reinforced the notion of a “real America” protecting the state from internal enemies—which, according to this narrative, had managed to take control of the state itself in the form of the Obama administration. The necessity of portraying the threat as Other, external to a “real America,” is obvious enough in the rise of the “birther” conspiracy. The right merged everything they opposed into a singular force attempting to destroy America: recall the infamous Glenn Beck conspiracy board, according to which the Service Employees International Union was selling copies of The Coming Insurrection to help Obama institute Islamo-Fascist Leninism. This completed the process via which the right had begun to view all who disagreed with their doctrines as the enemy and to consider themselves a distinct political project based around the defense of America.

Paranoia took over in the mainstream right. All sources of information that did not reinforce their views, all policies that could be portrayed as part of a “liberal conspiracy,” all efforts to promote social tolerance were seen as direct attacks against America itself. The conspiratorial tendency that Republicans had incorporated into the party in the late 1990s had metastasized into a belief that Republicans were constantly under assault by enemies that must be destroyed. The entirety of society and politics were viewed as the terrain of an ongoing civil war, conceptualized in increasingly millenarian terms. To those outside the right, this narrative seemed completely divorced from reality—but within these circles, these theories were the result of years of social polarization and burgeoning ideas about cultural warfare, promoted by Republican politicians. Departing from the idea of a lifestyle under threat, moving through the concept of cultural warfare into conspiracy theories and the framework of civilizational warfare, an overtly racist call to “protect Western civilization” became the cornerstone of contemporary right wing politics.

The open embracing of conspiracy theory generated several mutations within right-wing discourse, two of which became prominent.

The first mutation took the form of the Tea Party and the birther conspiracy—from which Donald Trump’s candidacy ultimately emerged. In these circles, conspiracy theories fueled by Facebook and online right-wing platforms spread at an unprecedented pace, generating theories about everything from “death panels” to undocumented immigration and eventually culminating in QAnon. The rapid pace at which these theories proliferated and were adopted by the Republican Party and their attendant media organizations, such as Fox News, created the conditions for these narratives to grow increasingly divergent from demonstrable and observable fact. In these circles, the acceptance of information had less to do with its veracity than with the declared politics of the communicator. This backlash against “liberal media”—i.e., any media organization that did not valorize right-wing narratives—formed the basis of the “fake news” narrative later pushed by Trump.

The second mutation was the emergence of newly empowered militia and white nationalist movements, which had come to exist in close proximity with one another twenty years earlier when they were relatively isolated during the Clinton era. These organizations capitalized on their newfound access to people in positions of power. Narratives about defending the state against “outsiders” continued to spread online, enabling militia groups to capitalize on populist discontent in the waning years of the Obama administration. These elements began to organize through several different channels, including attempts to carry out attacks against immigrants and Muslims, the emergence of “citizen’s militias” in places like Ferguson, Missouri in response to the uprising against racist police violence, and direct standoffs with state forces such as the one at the Bundy Ranch in 2014. These confrontations provided a point of condensation, while right-wing media pointed to them as examples of “resistance” to the supposed internal threat.

Concurrent with the acceleration of activity within conspiracy theory and militia circles was the rise of the “Alt-Right,” which emerged during “Gamer Gate” in 2014. Largely driven by the Internet and misogynist white grievance, this element introduced a new and well-funded influence into the right-wing ecosystem. The Alt-Right is rooted in the white-collar racist right-wing, populated by figures like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimlow who were often seen as soft and bourgeois by other elements of the far-right. Taylor, Brimlow, and similar figures are situated in the universities and think tanks of Washington, DC; they had always operated in a space between the official Republican Party and the Nazi skinheads and racist militias that had dominated the far-right fringe for decades. Flush with cash from tech and financial industry funders and armed with a logic of strategic deception, the Alt-Right gained widespread attention through online harassment campaigns, which they justified by disingenuously leveraging the rhetoric of free speech. Thanks to the developments of the preceding years, the Alt-Right was able to traffic openly in conspiracy theories and disinformation while portraying anyone who opposed them as part of the “liberal establishment”—the groups that the right had convinced their adherents represented an internal threat.

As the online presence of the Alt-Right grew, they gained entry into influential Republican circles by teaming up with older, more traditional racist conservatives who had attained positions from which they could shape policy. This influence was amplified by publications like Breitbart, run by Trump’s confidant Steve Bannon, and funded by the Mercer family, who made billions running hedge funds. For Republicans like the Mercers, embracing the Alt-Right was a strategy to gain power within conservative circles and overcome the power networks of more traditional funders like the Koch brothers. Others recognized the power that they could wield by tapping into the online forces assembling around the Alt-Right. This online presence was supplemented by the mobilization of older conservatives through the Tea Party, rising far-right activist energy, and the construction of a culture around the militia movement.

Many conservative politicians began to embrace this new formation, despite its outright racism and the ways it used confrontational tactics to achieve its goals. In many ways, as with Gingrich and DeLay in past decades, Republican politicians saw this new element of the right wing as a possible source from which they could draw grassroots energy. They hoped to use this energy to compensate for the fact that the Republican Party was becoming a minoritarian party with a voter base that was slowly dying out—just as they used gerrymandering and voter suppression to counteract this disadvantage. They saw an opportunity to construct a voting block that was completely loyal to them and isolated from any other perspectives, beginning with the demonization of the “liberal media” and eventually encompassing every aspect of everyday life—where people buy food and clothes, what kind of cars they drive, the music they listen to, the books they read. The social “bubble” that the right had spent years building crystalized, enabling them to mobilize rage and reactionary anger almost at will. Though this allowed the Republicans to leverage parliamentary procedure to limit much of the Obama agenda, it also created the conditions that led to the old guard of the party losing control over the party itself.

Out of this moment arose Donald Trump, who ran a campaign that was as openly racist as it was nationalistic, as blatantly grounded in disinformation as it was in a politics of social division and white grievance. Even though his candidacy was openly rejected by traditional Republican power circles, they quickly came to understand that their attempts to build a grassroots conservativism had caused them to lose control over the force that they had helped call into being. The Overton Window in the US had shifted so far right by this point that the politics of Pat Buchanan, which the Republican base of the 1990s had rejected as racist, were now firmly entrenched as core Republican beliefs. The Trump campaign set about tearing down the remaining elements of the right that resisted his overt politics of racial division; in the process, it empowered the overtly racist elements within the right that had been gaining influence for years. Many commentators attributed this shift to the rise of the Alt-Right and its internet disinformation and trolling campaigns. In fact, the stage had been set for Trump long before, when the narrative of white communities at risk of destruction gained currency in the years following the Civil Rights Movement.

Thanks to the overt articulation of racist politics, the isolation of the right in a media bubble, and the construction of an absolute conflict between the right and all other political and social groups, the Trump campaign found a ready group of supporters. This mobilization invoked the idea of being under attack by “others,” but it also invited this base to serve as a force in offensive street action. The forces of militarization and social polarization that had been gaining ground on the right for years were unleashed in the street. All around the US, Trump supporters attacked immigrants, vandalized stores and places of worship, carried out mass shootings in the name of ethnic cleansing, and organized rallies and marches during which participants often attacked everyone from organized opposition to random passersby.

This mobilization enabled Trump not only to win the nomination and the presidency, but to marginalize practically all other factions of the Republican Party. This, in turn, created a situation in which normal conservatives were willing to consider taking on counterinsurgency roles on behalf of the state to defend the “homeland” against opposition to Trump, who has become synonymous with the rise of the white Christian “true America” to power.

This popularization of formerly fringe ideas has been widespread and terrifying. On the level of society, this manifests as a sort of cultural warfare, instilling inescapable and constant fear: immigrants fear being rounded up, dissidents fear being targeted by the state or right-wing vigilantes, targeted groups fear discrimination and police racism. Over the past four years, elements of the overtly racist right have openly mobilized in the streets, causing a massive social crisis—yet this has also driven elements of the left and left-adjacent circles to mobilize against rising fascist activity, and they have largely succeeded in driving the far right off the streets again, or at least limiting their gains.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has not hesitated to use the mechanisms of the state to crack down on dissidents and harass populations considered to threaten the re-establishment of white hegemony, while continuously spreading disinformation to construct a parallel reality. The justification for targeting dissidents is descended directly from the concept of defending “real America” from attack by secretive internal enemies. Narratives that reinforce this portrayal of the scenario are promoted, regardless of verifiability, by an entire universe of right-wing media. Trump has positioned himself and the media outlets that support him as the sole sources of truth for his supporters. Consequently, he has been able to frame any opposition—even simple fact checking—as an attack against himself and his vision of America, separating his adherents from all other sectors of the American public.

What emerged is a sort of final act, a culminating move in the construction of the concept of civil war on the right. The right transformed from a force opposing everyone they considered immoral or un-American, including the state, depending on who was in power, to a force that was completely loyal to the state. In this transformation, the concept of civil war also underwent a fundamental shift from a notion of social or cultural conflict between defined social factions, as it was for the religious right, to a strategy of defending the state against oppositional forces. In this transformation, the concept of civil war acquired a central paradox, in which the term came to mean something wholly other than its initial connotations within right-wing rhetoric. It no longer denotes a conflict that occurs between social factions outside of formal state power; now it describes a conflict in which one political or social faction becomes a force operating alongside the state within a framework of counterinsurgency.

The Concept of Civil War

The concept of civil war, in its traditional sense, presumes that there are two or more political factions competing for state power, or else, a horizontal conflict between social factions that are otherwise understood as part of the same larger political or social category. In this framework, the factions that enter into conflict are either doing so directly, with the intention of eliminating each other, or in a situation in which the control of the state is in question, with different factions fighting to gain that control. The horizontality of civil war distinguishes it from concepts like revolution or insurgency, in which people struggle against the state or a similar structure such as a colonial regime or occupying army. To say that a conflict is “horizontal” does not mean that the factions involved wield equal political, economic, or social power—that is almost never the case. Rather, in this sense, “horizontality” is a concept used in the study of insurgencies to describe a conflict as taking place across a society, without necessarily being focused on the logistics or manifestations of the state. In shifting the focus of struggle away from the operational manifestations of the state, this understanding of civil war tends to isolate the terrain of engagement. Rather than centering the struggle in everyday life—in the dynamics of our day-to-day economic and political activities—this understanding of civil war engenders a series of mutations.

First, it forces a sort of calcifying of the way the conflict is understood. Rather than the dynamic, kinetic conflicts that typify contemporary insurgencies, in which conflict manifests as a result of and in relation to everyday life, this way of seeing approaches social divisions as rigid forms. If we begin by assuming the existence of a fundamental social division preceding any questions about contextual political dynamics—as in the concept of cultural warfare embraced by the right—this will cause us to identify both the enemy and our “friends” as permanent and static entities. In this conceptual framework, these identities necessarily precede the conflict—they form the basis of the conflict within the original category of unity—and remain static throughout the conflict, as they are the terms that define the conflict itself. Consequently, partisanship becomes a sort of ideological rigidity in which actions are driven by a purely abstract definition of friendship and enmity.

There are clearly elements of the aforementioned “horizontality” in the current uprising and the reaction to it, and concepts of identity have played a key role in the way that the conflict has emerged, but the reality is more complex. If the social struggle that exploded into the streets in 2020 had simply been a conflict between right-wing social and political factions and their anti-fascist opposition, then the characterization of civil war might have been apt, just as it would have been if it were simply a conflict over who controls the state. But the actual scenario is profoundly more frightening than the clashes we have seen in Charlottesville, Berkeley, and Portland since 2016. In 2020, we have seen political factions functioning as para-state forces aligned with the state, working in concert with the police and openly engaging in counterinsurgency measures employing extralegal violence. The state is no longer simply refusing to act in response to violence between fascists and anti-fascists, as it had since 2016. Starting in summer 2020, factions within the state actively began to call these right-wing forces out into the street, while at the same time promoting conspiracy theories to legitimize militias and expand their reach within the moderate right, modifying DHS intelligence reports to justify the violence, and using the Department of Justice as a legal enforcement arm. Between August and November, all this took place in coordination with the messaging of Trump’s reelection campaign.

The traditional understanding of civil war implies a conflict between two distinct factions within a wider unity that defines both, as argued by Carl Schmitt. For example, a civil war would be an apt description of an open fight between fascists and anti-fascists over control of the state. The current scenario does not match that narrative. One element of the conflict is openly identifying as an element of the state itself, however unofficially; the perceived legitimacy of the right-wing position derives from their claim to be working in the interests of “America,” even if that involving opposing certain elements of the state. Describing the defense of the state as civil war creates the illusion of a horizontal social conflict, when in fact what we are describing is nothing more than informal policing.

This explains how the contemporary right wing embraces the police, soldiers, and murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse in the same breath. They understand themselves as fighting alongside the state to preserve it. It is not just that Trump has leveraged them for this purpose; their entire narrative propels them in this direction, rendering them willing participants in the establishment of authoritarianism under the banner of “freedom.” All the state has to do to mobilize them is to conjure an enemy and legitimize extra-legal action.

In calling them forward and sanctioning their actions, the state has employed a strategy with two clear objectives. First, to compensate for the state’s failure or hesitance to mobilize enough force to contain the uprising. Giving leeway to vigilante forces, the state enters a zone of exception that allows for violence not subject to the constraints that ordinarily limit what the state can do by force. Second, to construct the uprising as a threat. Taking advantage of widespread xenophobia, racism, and citizen militia mentality on the right, the state presented the uprising as something outside of America, posing a threat to America. This mentality is clearly confined to one segment of the American population, but that segment is all that is necessary for the operation to succeed.

For these moves to be effective, it was necessary to construct a threat that was both outside and internal. The narrative of “outside agitators” was mobilized to delegitimize Black resistance by denying that it ever actually occurred, insinuating that “outside agitators” drove the local rebellions. This narrative has been deployed across the political spectrum, from conservative Republicans to progressive Democrats, in a flagrant attempt to decenter the idea of direct, localized resistance. This served a number of different agendas. In cities governed by Democrats, it enabled local administrations to deny the failures of reformism; in more conservative areas, politicians used it to deny the profound racism at the core of the American project and to preserve the narrative of American exceptionalism. This effort to conceal Black resistance was easily debunked, as arrestee statistics around the country repeatedly showed that the majority of people arrested in local protests were from the immediate area and were hardly all “white anarchists.”

When the falsehood about “outside agitators” collapsed, Trump turned to defining whole cities as outside the realm of American legitimacy. This included threatening local officials, declaring that they had lost control of cities, and ultimately designating those cities as “anarchist jurisdictions.” This successfully mobilized right-wing groups to go into some of these cities and start conflicts, but ultimately, the reach of this ploy was limited. For counterinsurgency to succeed, it needs to employ narratives that are widely accepted—and uncontrolled “anarchist jurisdictions” failed this test. This narrative has been most effective when it focuses specifically on “anarchists,” defining the term as anyone involved in any sort of direct resistance, including marches. By promoting the idea that Americans face a dangerous adversary bent on evil, the Trump administration tried to construct the terms of a horizontal social conflict in which elements of the right could play a direct role in fighting the “anarchists.”

Calling the militia movement into the streets via a narrative of total conflict shifted the terrain of conflict itself. Where previously, the unrest emerging throughout society was directed at the state, suddenly those in revolt were compelled to contend with two forces, the state and the paramilitaries. In this mobilization of social conflict, the state was able to not only gain force in the streets, often leveraged through threats and direct political violence, but was also able to decenter the focus of resistance away from the state, and into the realm of social conflict.

In mobilizing paramilitaries, the state both leveraged and incorporated the social polarization of the past decades. This provided the state with a mechanism outside of the structure of law through which repression may take place. In embracing this informal force, the state adopted a strategy similar to the approach seen in Egypt and then Syria during the so-called Arab Spring, in which reactionary social forces were mobilized to attack uprisings.

When this took place in Egypt in 2011, the rebels in the streets did not allow this strategem to divert them from focusing on bringing down the Mubarak regime. But in Syria, the introduction of paramilitaries into the conflict not only hampered the uprising from focusing on the state, but also restructured the conflict along ethnic and religious lines, diverting the uprising into sectarian warfare and enabling the state to ride out the ensuing bloodbath. These scenarios were similar in that forces outside of the state were mobilized for the purpose of counterinsurgency, even if the kinds of force involved were different. As in Egypt and Syria, the struggle in the US could be diverted into sectarian violence. If this takes place, it will be the consequence of a fundamental misunderstanding of how the state functions and what the role of paramilitary forces is.

Though these situations differ in many ways from the one we find ourselves in, there is one common thread that ties them together. In Egypt, Syria, and in the current American context, the narrative of civil war initially developed specifically in communities that were aligned with the state. These communities conceive of civil war in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, there is a narrative describing a conflict between social factions, a “with us or against us” mentality. On the other hand, these social divisions are drawn along the same lines that define loyalty within the political space. The factions that see themselves as aligned with the state shape their identity largely around some sort of ideological project (such as right-wing Christianity in the US, for example) that they seek to implement through the state, leading them to see all opponents of the state as social enemies. In this framework, the concept of civil war becomes an analogue for a fundamentally different phenomenon, the voluntary involvement of those outside the state in its operations as paramilitary forces.

So the question confronting us is not whether to engage in civil war. Rather, the concept of civil war, as popularly understood in the contemporary United States, is a misnomer.

Law and Liberal Counterinsurgency

The emergence of this paramilitary phenomenon must be understood in the wider context of the development of counterinsurgency strategies as a response to the George Floyd uprising. Counterinsurgency theory is a vast field, emerging from colonial powers’ attempts to maintain imperialism in the wake of World War II. Beginning with British tactics during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, the model provided by those attempts to maintain colonial power came to exert profound influence on subsequent military and policing theory. Both “community policing” and the approach that the US military took during the later phase of the occupation of Iraq derive from thinking that originally emerged at that time. The primary goal of contemporary counterinsurgency, at its most basic, is to separate the insurgents from the population, and to enlist, as much as possible, this same population in initiatives to eliminate the insurgency. As French military thinker David Galula wrote in the 1950s, “The population becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy.”

Unlike the traditional understanding of warfare, which assumes a frontal conflict between identifiable, organized forces and the control of territory, counterinsurgency engages at the level of everyday life, where material action is taken and politics occurs. The terrain of the conflict is not space, necessarily, but rather security—the participants seek the ability to contain crisis in a given area, and then to expand that area. This has taken many forms—from the British brutally relocating entire populations to camps and the Americans napalm-bombing Vietnam to the softer approach of buying loyalty seen in the Sons of Iraq program during the Iraq War. However, the core of this approach is always a system that creates incentives for loyalty and negative consequences for disobedience, resistance, and insurgency. As many historians of US policing have pointed out, there is a cycle in which tactics developed in foreign conflicts are integrated into American policing and vice versa. Counterinsurgency is no exception; the earliest domestic appropriations of this approach were used to provide political victories for the moderate elements of political movements in the 1960s, followed by the emergence of so-called “community policing.”

The important thing here is to understand how this approach has been modified during the uprising that began in May 2020. In some ways, the response to the George Floyd uprising employed longstanding techniques—for example, the attempt to recuperate moderate elements. In other ways, we have seen a dramatic break with the techniques that the state relied upon until recently. To understand these differences, we can begin by tracing where they originate.

The discourse of law and order has formed the foundation of the contemporary prison-industrial complex and the explosive rise in prison populations—paving the way for “broken windows” policing, the militarization of police forces, mandatory minimum sentences, and the expansion of the prison system. This discourse relies on two fundamental elements: the state and the law. Following Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, we can describe the state as a formation through which the will of sovereignty is expressed, with the primary goals being the projection of sovereignty and the continuation of that projection. Within this construction of the state, law exists as an expression of sovereignty—but it is not the only possible expression. The state can suspend law, or supersede law, in an attempt to perpetuate itself.

We saw this play out during the George Floyd uprising, as elements of the state abandoned the framework of a police force limited by law, along with the idea that laws against assault, threats, and brandishing weapons apply equally to everyone. Though we often think of the state and law as phenomena that imply each another, the state exceeds the structure of law. When liberal activists wonder why cops appear to be above the law, it is because they literally are. The state is not premised on the construction and maintenance of laws—Stalin’s regime, for example, was often utterly arbitrary. The construction of laws necessitates the existence of the state, but the converse is not true.

Philosophically, the structure of law functions to the extent that there cannot be exceptions to the law—in other words, to the degree that the law is enforceable and that there are no moments outside of law. Yet laws—or, to be precise, the dictates of a sovereign structure—do not function simply through declaration; a Bill in Congress is just a piece of paper. Both the law and extra-legal impositions of sovereign will only take force via mechanisms that can impose them upon everyday life. The police are one such mechanism.

Understood thus, law exists as a sort of aspirational totality intended to cover all time and space and to regulate the actions of all citizens. Within this construct, any attack against the police is in some sense an attack upon the state itself. Attacking police, building barricades, and other such disorderly actions all serve to prevent the police from projecting force into an area. Even outside the framework of law, in a state of emergency and in open warfare, the structure of the occupying force and the ability of that force to impose the will of the occupiers functions only to the degree that they can crush resistance within that space. Accordingly, any illegal activity, from unpermitted street marches to open rioting and looting, must be stopped at all costs—otherwise the hegemony of law will degrade, eventually leading to the disorganization of the police and the breakdown of the state.

The narrative of “law and order” presents this concept of law as the absolute definition of life and existence. The formal argument in the US political context is that law must apply to all people in the same way all the time, though we all know that this is never the reality and that in fact, the administration itself does not adhere to the law. Under the Trump administration, the state takes the form of a traditional extra-legal sovereignty structure, via which the will of the sovereign imposed through force and law serves as a convenient mechanism to criminalize any form of resistance.

This tendency to employ the state as an extra-legal apparatus for imposing sovereignty has manifested itself in a variety of forms—including the argument that people who attack property should spend decades in jail, the use of federal law enforcement to protect buildings from graffiti, and the use of federal charges against protesters, often for actions that local officials would not have deemed worth prosecuting. The goal is clear: to suppress the uprising in its entirety, rather than to regulate or channel its energy. This approach largely failed, often provoking severe reactions in places like Portland, where the presence of federal law enforcement on the streets energized the uprising and inspired some interesting tactical innovations.

The other side of this counterinsurgency puzzle is an emerging form of liberal counterinsurgency. Liberal counterinsurgency is nothing new. We can trace it to the attempt to moderate the labor movement after World War II and subsequent efforts to contain the Civil Rights Movement; the current strategies are familiar from the later days of the Iraq occupation. The fundamental move here is to provide an access point through which elements of a political faction or movement can get involved in the state. Sometimes this is through the mechanism of voting and the channeling of resistance into electoralism. If that fails, or if the crisis is acute enough, the state will attempt to incorporate these moderate elements directly by appointing them to government positions, including them in committees and in the constructing of policy. Arguably, the beneficiaries of previous applications of this technique form the core of the contemporary Democratic Party, which is comprised of the moderate wings of various political initiatives, all of whom were given access to some element of power. The final move in this strategy is to delegitimize or crush the ungovernable elements that refuse to compromise.

At its core, liberal counterinsurgency relies on fracturing political initiatives, uprisings, and organizations, sorting the participants into those who can be recuperated and those who must be eliminated. We saw elements of the state and various aspiring state actors employ this strategy in response to the George Floyd uprising. Early on, this took the form of conspiracy theories about outside agitators and agent provocateurs; eventually, it progressed into discourse about the importance of peaceful protest, a focus on defunding the police rather than abolishing them, and calls for people to follow the leadership of community organizers who were attempting to pacify the movement.

Liberals have attempted to completely reframe what has occurred in the United States since May within the context of acceptable politics. They have worked tirelessly to produce studies showing that the majority of the demonstrations were “peaceful.” They have spoken in the media in support of the uprising, but only mentioning elements adjacent to the uprising who were already associated with the electoral system, such as the various candidates and politicians who got tear gassed for the cameras. They have condemned the actions of the police, but only as violence perpetuated against the “innocent.” The move to glorify peaceful protest implicitly excludes and condemns those who do not fit this narrative of legitimate resistance.

Once the most radical elements are delegitimized and excluded, liberals move to criminalize them, even going so far as to justify police force against ”rioters,” often in the same cities where politicians started by condemning police violence. To hear them tell it, legitimate “peaceful” protests were hijacked by violent elements and outside agitators: illegitimate participants undermining the goals of the protests. Those of us who were in the streets at the end of May know that this narrative is absurd—people were fighting back from the moment that the cops shot the first tear gas—yet it has gained favor in liberal circles. This narrative is an attempt to hijack the uprising, to draw what was an ungovernable, uncontrollable element in direct conflict with the state back into electoral discourse.

Regarding the narrative that focuses on defunding the police—a proposal that means different things to different people—the liberal political class immediately began to insist on articulating demands that could be addressed to the state. This follows a pattern familiar from the Occupy movement and the rioting after police murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Structurally, the act of formulating demands suggests that the state is a legitimate interlocutor; it frames an uprising as a sort of militant lobbying directed at the state. By insisting on a model that centers demands, liberals position the state as the chief mechanism through which “change” occurs, ruling out the possibility of fighting against the state and the police themselves. The purpose of the demand is not so much to “win concessions” as it is to force potential uprisings back within the bounds of “acceptable” politics mediated by the state; this is why politicians always insist that movements must articulate clear demands.

By framing the discussion around demands to defund the police rather than attempts to abolish or eliminate them, liberals shifted the discussion to the less threatening arena of policies and budgets. This also enabled them to provide the moderate elements involved in the uprising with access to political power, in order to channel that energy into the formal legislative process. The irony is that the George Floyd uprising is a result not only of the long history of racism in the United States, but also the ways that prior attempts at liberal reform have failed.

This liberal counterinsurgency led to an inevitable conclusion: in August, Joe Biden directly declared that riots are not “protests,” essentially asserting that only attempts to engage in dialogue with the state are acceptable and that the full force of the state should be used to crush whatever ungovernable elements of the uprising remain. Biden combined both approaches—both repressing and coopting—by separating “peaceful” protesters from “rioters” and “anarchists,” then speaking directly to the most moderate demands for police reform.

Biden expresses the other element of the core paradox within state strategy: the state will allow protests, but redefines protesting to eliminate resistant elements. The goal is to provide an outlet, to allow people the opportunity to express complaints about particular state actions as long as no one challenges the state itself or the bureaucracies and parties that interface with it. This approach is fundamentally grounded in the concept of containment, according to which the state does not necessarily attempt to eliminate crisis, but rather aims to keep whatever happens under control via management and maintenance.

In the response to the George Floyd uprising, these differing approaches to law and security functioned to undermine each other; this is what set the stage for the emergence of para-state forces in response to the uprising. The “law and order” approach, based around imposing sovereignty through force, created a situation in which the forces of the state were empowered to employ increasing levels of violence to suppress the uprising. As we have seen in the streets, the use of impact munitions, beatings, arrests, and tear gas in 2020 has far outstripped any precedent in recent protest history. In response to these tactics, we saw an escalation on the part of the rebels in the streets, increasing numbers of whom began to form shield walls, bring gas masks, throw stones, and set fires, occasionally even employing firearms or Molotov cocktails. These were not aberrations, but common tactics emerging across a wide geographical area, fundamentally endangering a liberal counterinsurgency strategy based around containment.

As conflict escalates, containment-based approaches encounter two difficulties. First, it becomes increasingly challenging to identify more moderate or “innocent” elements and to isolate them from rebellious elements. Likewise, as state violence intensifies, it becomes harder to make the argument that reformism is valid or effective. Rebels on the street became more uncompromising as the uprising stretched on, seeing how increasing police violence indicates the failures of reformist approaches. Second, containment-based approaches reveal a fundamental contradiction. These approaches necessitate legitimizing some element of the uprising, which means acknowledging the legitimacy of the critique of the American political project it articulates. Yet as an uprising becomes increasingly uncontrollable, legitimizing these criticisms is tantamount to legitimizing the violence of the uprising itself.

As the liberal approach to counterinsurgency contributed to legitimizing the narrative of the uprising, it came into conflict with the law-and-order approach. The law-and-order approach drove militancy in the street, which in turn drove increasingly egregious police responses, rendering it increasingly difficult to contain the crisis. At the same time, because liberals took the position of supporting the core criticisms articulated via the uprising, they could not easily abandon those assertions, even as it became difficult to find elements that would abandon those who remained active in the street. This is what created the situation in which elements of the state were compelled to exceed the bounds of the law. In this context, the state resumed its essential nature as an imposition of sovereign force, in which law is only one of several possible manifestations, but at the same time, it also began to make space for extralegal para-state forces. This, in turn, created the conditions for far-right elements to receive leeway to operate outside of the law.

The inclusion of social forces from outside of the formal state structure in counterinsurgency strategies contains in microcosm several dynamics that have always been latent in US politics. It is from this perspective, in view of the contradictions latent in the counterinsurgency strategies deployed against the uprising, that we should understand the emerging discourse of civil war.

Social War, Not Civil War

The mobilization of paramilitary forces outside the limitations of the law points to a core element that is essential to this specific counterinsurgency operation as well as to the state in general. Throughout the Trump administration, we have seen the norms that formed the foundations of the perceived legitimacy of the democratic state erode. As this veneer has worn away, the state has also lost the ability to confine conflict within the bounds of the legislative process. Over the past three years, the relationship between the state and society has become increasingly characterized by material conflict. The Trump administration has used executive edict and raw violence to impose an image of America derived from the far right. This is the state as material force, pure and simple. Under Obama, repression was associated with failed compromise or the surgical precision of surveillance and drone strikes; under Trump, the naked repressive force of the state is laid bare for all to see.

Inherent in the functioning of the state is the defining of what is inside it and what is outside of it. According to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for example, what is outside of the state is described as the “state of nature” in which life is allegedly “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This account of the “outside” justifies the existence of the state as a mechanism to prevent what is outside from manifesting itself. Inside the state, the sovereignty of the state is considered to be total, while the outside is understood as any situation in which the sovereignty of the state is absent, or at least threatened. In US political theory, the concepts underlying the state are held to be universal, supposedly applicable to all humans. Therefore, anything outside of the state—even if that outside is geographically internal—is considered an absolute other that must be destroyed.

Consequently, in the US, the paramilitary is constructed both as a force in social conflict with any geographically internal enemy defined as outside of the American project, and as a force inherently tied to the preservation of the state and the prevention of change. Until recently, the concept of the enemy was tempered by self-imposed limitations, which served to reintegrate rebels through liberal counterinsurgency methods or to concentrate state action chiefly within the legal system. Today, these limitations have outlived their usefulness and right-wing militias are eager to eliminate the “outside.”

Now that the state has dispensed with the niceties that served to conceal its core as a logistics of raw force, a few things have become clear. First, the structure of law as a concept that theoretically applies to all people equally was based in the assertion of a sort of universal inside that included all within the purview of the state. Dispensing with law except insofar as it can be manipulated to serve as a weapon, the administration has opened up a space outside of law, a terrain formed by the state of emergency. Second, the paramilitary is no longer a force separate from the state. From the perspective of the uprising, there is no distinction between struggle against the far right and struggle against the state. This is not a horizontal conflict on the level of society—that would assume that all the forces involved were part of the “inside.” Rather, this is a material conflict between the state and all those defined as outside and against it.

With the elimination of the universality of law, framed through the concept of equal protection, and the overt incorporation of the paramilitary into state counterinsurgency strategy, the language of civil war loses its usefulness. Civil war is fundamentally a conflict between social factions, but that is not what is occurring here. That framework actually distorts the current dynamics of engagement. We are not experiencing a conflict between social factions, regardless of how the right conceives of the conflict. Rather, by incorporating the defense of the state into paramilitary doctrine and framing this around a rigid set of ideological commitments (termed “freedom,” but which really represent forms of social control), the right wing has given rise to a political conflict about the state, its role, and the structure of state and police power.

If we embrace the concept of civil war as it has been constructed in the contemporary US context, we will find that this generates tactical problems. Embracing civil war as a strategic posture could cause us to neglect the terrain of everyday life, where the state actually operates and most conflicts play out. If we understand ourselves as contending in a civil war, we will likely look for a linear conflict between two identifiable forces fighting each other without regard to the material terrain.

What is at stake here is not just a conceptual distinction or a question of semantics. The core of the distinction is important to how we think of conflict in relation to the wider anarchist project.

Structures of law and capital always function to regulate and channel actions toward specific ends according to the will of those who wield sovereignty. Resistance is a concrete question of how to act to disrupt the operational logistics of the state—i.e., the police, in the broadest possible sense of the term, which is to say, all those who regulate behavior according to these dictates. If we embrace the posture of civil war, the conflict becomes conceptually displaced from the terrain of everyday life, in which the state and capital operate, into a zone of abstract opposition.

To frame the current conflict as a civil war is to describe the state as a secondary element, rather than the focus of action, and to conceptualize the conflict as a linear struggle between two rigidly identified factions, both of which are defined prior to the opening of hostilities. This approach would produce a social conflict in which the state will inevitably play a role, but in which we will fundamentally misunderstand the terms. Rather than seeking to understand the shifts that have occurred on the level of society and the ways in which the uprising has been successfully defined as an “outside” by the state, we would end up concentrating on only one element of the collaboration between the state and para-state forces. Essentially, we would replace a struggle for everything—for the whole of life itself—with a far less ambitious struggle against other elements in the social terrain.

Seeing things that way would end up limiting our tactical options. If we base our understanding of the terms of conflict around broad conceptual categories, it will be harder for us to strategize for a kinetic conflict with the state that is in a constant process of change. In fact, adopting a framework of rigid linear conflict tends to produce conditions in which popular resistance becomes impossible. Contagious popular resistance presupposes the breakdown of the limits of the political; it manifests at the moment that the distinction breaks down between those who define themselves and their actions “politically” and those who do not. This was what made the uprising so powerful, unpredictable, and transformative, enabling it to exceed the state’s capacity to impose control. Constructing a linear conflict between predefined factions according to the framework of civil war, we would reduce those currently outside of the self-identified political movement to bystanders, lacking agency in the conflict yet still suffering its side effects. Reducing our understanding of the social terrain to the task of identifying who is “us” and who is “them” would ultimately distract us from everyone who is not already tied to an identifiable faction and from all the ways that we could act to transform that terrain itself.

The George Floyd uprising has shown us the power latent in this concept of popular resistance, understood as a dynamic resistance. Over the past several months, the limits of the political have fundamentally ruptured, as popular understandings of the possibilities of political action have expanded to include all the elements of everyday life alongside traditional forms of activism. In this rupture, we can glimpse the dynamics of successful uprisings: the breaking down of the limitations that confine conflict within particular bounds, the generalization of this expanded sense of political conflict throughout everyday life, and the abolishing of the distinction between political spaces and other spaces of life. To embrace the framework of civil war in this context, in the ways that this concept has been defined and manifested by the right, would be to abandon the possibility unleashed by the uprising. It would mean turning away from a dynamic conflict that has been opaque in its sheer complexity and awe-inspiring in its scale. It would mean abandoning the social terrain, and, as a result, the dynamic, kinetic possibilities of popular resistance.

Battling Racism Beyond the Election

(Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

By Robert Bohm

Originally published at Real Progressives.

Not surprisingly, the recent non-indictment of the police who killed Breonna Taylor provoked angry sometimes violent protests. This shows us once again how systemic racism works. It kills blacks and other people of color, as it has done for centuries, and then, when community members and their supporters express outrage, despair or aggressive grief, the protesters are the ones who are castigated for expressing their dissatisfaction in “improper” ways. 

All this comes in the wake of months of unprecedented demonstrations against systemic racism. Yet, as the go-home-free verdict for Taylor’s killers shows, the mass movement’s work is far from done, since it hasn’t yet created the groundbreaking structural changes the country needs.  

Hence, the following—a series of thoughts pertaining to the issue of what kind of revolutionary (as opposed to reform) consciousness is required to destabilize and remove white supremacy, in all its systemic forms, from the nation’s institutions.   

Biden, the presidency and protests

Trump’s white supremacism and the anti-scientism of his responses to climate change and Covid-19 already have had catastrophic impacts on the nation. As have many of his other actions. It seems clear he should be replaced. But by what? I will examine here only one aspect of this complicated question—If Biden wins, what will happen to the protest movement against systemic racism?

On August 3rd, Joe Biden gave a speech in Pittsburgh in which he clarified, along with other points, an issue Democratic strategists were eager for him to speak on publicly—his take on the interconnection between peaceful demonstrations against systemic racism and the flare-ups of illegal acts (looting, arson, etc.) which sometimes accompany them.

In his Pittsburgh speech, the Democratic candidate announced the following, which he since has repeated in slightly reworded form many times:

I’m going to be very clear about all of this, rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted.

(Biden 2020)

Biden’s meaning is clear. He believes in peaceful protests but has no sympathy for violent ones. Furthermore, he wants those involved in illegal acts charged with crimes. 

Many Democratic Party (DP) insiders greeted this statement with applause, since they didn’t want Biden pigeonholed by Pres. Trump’s accusation that their candidate had no respect for law and order. 

Not only DP leaders but also many media outlets were pleased by Biden’s remarks. NBC, for instance, noted approvingly that Biden had gone on record as “strongly condemning a spate of recent violence in multiple U.S. cities.” (Edelman 2020)

Unfortunately, neither Democratic insiders nor the positive media reviews got it right analytically. Their cheers were ideological, not ethical. They believed Biden had strengthened his campaign by making the necessary practical move required to win—i.e., to state unequivocally that only orderly protests were acceptable and deviations from this rule would be met with appropriate police measures by a Biden presidency. 

In pushing this philosophy, Biden and his applauders rejected as irrelevant the fact that Biden made no effort to place recent US protests against police brutality and systemic racism in historical context. Yet by not doing this and instead offering only anti-violence platitudes, Biden demeaned and distorted the very US history which he claimed to be protecting when he declared, without nuance, that when it comes to “rioters” breaking the law in Kenosha and Portland or anywhere else, “None of this is protesting.”

I’m sorry, but this is bullshit. I say this not because I think protesters should loot stores or set cop cars ablaze but because what Biden omitted from his statement defines the statement’s character more than what he included in it. 

If alive today, Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Biden misleadingly quoted in his speech, would have similarly indicted Biden—for being overly judgmental and not examining the situation in all its complexity. 

How do we know this? Because of King’s own testimony as he struggled with similar issues. Although a nonviolence advocate, King eventually concluded that the heart of the looting/rioting/violence matter resided in the fact that in a time of white supremacist anti-black violence, a riot on the part of the targeted “is the language of the unheard” (King 1967) and therefore must be approached as such—i.e., with respect and an attempt to understand.

King’s message was simple: One didn’t have to like this particular “language” but one nonetheless had to listen and learn from it, rather than reflexively condemn it, since in the end the oppression which foments rioting is more a bludgeoning of decency than the riots. 

In the same speech, King made this abundantly clear directly after making his “unheard” statement. 

And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

(Ibid.)

Unfortunately, Biden couldn’t bring himself to say anything this astute. Instead, he stuffed his few words about protest-related violence into a terse series of campaign phrases designed not to shed light on the US’s struggle with white supremacy, but merely to win campaign points by countering Trump. 

Clearly, Biden doesn’t have it in him, or isn’t knowledgeable enough about the issue, to clarify that racial oppression is the culprit here, the ultimate systemic promoter of violence. Consequently, unlike King, he doesn’t realize that until systemic racism is defeated once and for all, public outbursts of violence such as looting and arson will continue. King may not have liked this, but he faced up to it, understood it and factored it into his analysis. Instead of showing this kind of grit, however, Biden strikes out.

His refusal to confront this dilemma head-on incarnates the formula for how to fight racism “diplomatically,” without being too “disruptive”— i.e., to go slowly, not rock the boat. 

History is real, but first you have to find it

As with the George Floyd protests, political agitation and struggles for justice are never easy. They’re always complicated by interactions between multiple factors. 

Given such complexity, the idea that protesters’ efforts (demonstrations, acts of civil disobedience, boycotts, declarations of purpose, losses of temper, etc.) can be summarized accurately by platitudes and ad-speak rather than with analysis is ludicrous. Yet sometimes such triteness seems seductive. After all, such responses require so little thinking and therefore so little time. The easy answers are so easy.

In terms of the US love for easy answers, we need no further proof of this than our nation’s central myth: our fairytale of the American Revolution with its supposedly sacred Founding Fathers supported by throngs of liberty lovers. According to the story, all of these folks, Founders and throngs alike, were guided by the same perfectly working moral compass as they marched toward Democracy while singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in harmony.

So, since the American Revolution is the beginning point of our mythicized history, let’s look at a few of the protests during the two decades prior to that event and see how they compare to Biden’s definition of what divides “real” protests from lawlessness. Also, what do they reveal about the dissenters’ character and the divisions among them? Finally, what do they say about the evolution from reformist demands to revolution: seceding from Britain and becoming an independent nation in charge of the continent’s colonization?

One thing the colonies’ protests show is how untidy such dissenting actions can be. This was illustrated in the heated differences among colonists over how protests should be conducted. Some of the most robust of these arguments took place between the wealthy on one side and artisans, laborers, free blacks and other so-called low-class persons on the other. As historian Gary B. Nash has written, “For those in the lower echelons of colonial society, elementary political rights and social justice, rather than the protection of property” (Nash 2006, 94) were their primary political concerns. 

This divide between rich and poor protesters unfolded prior to the revolution in tactical collisions between the two groups. 

One tactic that unnerved wealthy colonists sprang from the outrage felt by colonial inhabitants against England’s practice of inflating costs for British-made products by forcing colonists to pay extra taxes on them. In retaliation, many colonial merchants united under the banner of a non-importation agreement––i.e., a collective refusal to buy British products or to sell England colonial goods. This agreement, however, soon became more complicated when members of the so-called rabble decided to police shopkeepers to ensure their fidelity to the accord. If they found one who’d wavered, a small band of rebels would break into the owner’s shop, then vandalize it as a warning that no slacking was allowed. 

Even anti-British property owners disapproved of such behavior. They reasoned that if common folk were willing to destroy alleged traitors’ property, they also might turn someday on wealthy protesters. The affluent’s fear of this stemmed from the poor’s resentment of them for passing local laws which restricted wages, criminalized poverty, and banned unemployed persons in search of work from entering towns. (Quigley 1997, 114-115)

As tensions between pro-British Tories and more seditious colonists grew, rowdy insurgents patrolled their communities in search of spies suspected of informing officials about residents who operated smuggling rings in order to circumvent British duties. Although alleged spies were given a variety of possible punishments––e.g., stripped naked and paraded through the streets, tarred and feathered, thrashed by rebel gangs, etc.––one type made the “more refined” cringe. Rebels “painted” the outside of the suspected traitor’s house with a foul gunk made from a variety of stomach-turning ingredients including human body waste. 

Another penalty imposed on monarchy loyalists was home invasions. One famous instance of this occurred in 1765 when protesters broke into the home of Thomas Hutchinson, the Lt. Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who was a known British sympathizer. The invasion was a spinoff of rioting earlier that night in the wake of England’s passage of the Stamp Act, which mandated that colonists use only printed materials published on special highly taxed paper manufactured in Britain and marked with a government stamp. 

Hutchinson later described in a letter to a friend how a subgroup of the rioters “fell upon my house with the rage of devils, and in a moment with axes split down the doors and entered. (Hosmer 1896, 92)

Once inside, the protesters went on a wrecking spree. They knocked down all the interior walls, stole whatever they wanted, climbed to the roof and toppled the house’s cupola to the ground. At dawn, the rampagers finally fled. Not only was Hutchinson’s home in ruins but, he wrote, “The garden-house was laid flat, and all my trees, etc., broke to the ground.”

(Ibid.)

Another form of protest entailed rebels’ destruction of symbols of British rule like coats-of-arms, effigies of loyalists, British patrol ships in search of smugglers, etc. An additional example of symbol demolition occurred in New York after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence five days following its signing. Subsequent to the reading, a mob, including colonial soldiers, toppled a lead statue of King George III, then smashed it to pieces. Later, the fragments were melted down to make bullets for use against the British in the unfolding war. (D’Costa 2017)

This act proclaimed that no matter what English law said they should do, they instead chose to ignore the law, destroy the old political system and take their destiny into their own hands.

Although there were certainly peaceful protesters during the pre-revolutionary period, I gave these examples of protesters’ excesses to make a simple, but important, point: the Biden statement quoted at this essay’s beginning isn’t merely wrong, it purposefully distorts our history. This falsified version of our past is a type of distemper vaccine designed to fog people’s brains, depower us. It’s what political insiders call upon when they want to stir our patriotism and convince us to adopt so-called traditional values. They’ve institutionalized this mirage history so we can’t find the lessons in our real history. 

One such lesson is that there are sometimes good reasons for lawlessness. For instance, during the decades prior to the revolution, Britain’s relentless repression of the colonies without regard to how restrained many protesters were, created a combustible environment in which everything occurred at a higher fever-pitch than normal and consequently serious conflicts ensued. 

But those conflicts weren’t only between the colonies and the British. They also included class conflicts within the growing numbers of those who supported independence. Additionally, there were what we might label the silent collisions between the very idea of freedom and its realization, collisions which most whites didn’t yet possess the courage, cultural introspection, goodness or intelligence to articulate—e.g., the need for full equality for African slaves and the indigenous. 

All freedom and justice battles—whether the American revolution or the fight today for systemic change regarding racism—contain such volatile ingredients. Therefore, those who claim to support such revolutions and battles, but only if those movements adhere to strict rules of decorous behavior, are anti-change. They’re the kind of people who, after placing a pot of water on a stove turned to high, badmouth the water’s “violent propensities” if it boils. 

This doesn’t mean we can’t keep our movement today as peaceful as possible—we can. However, we shouldn’t let Biden and others sucker us into forgetting Rev. King’s warning that no true racial peace will be achieved until systemic racism is permanently laid to rest. It’s not the protesters, but the attempt to repress them and the movement they’ve built, which sparks the violence.