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Title: Fighting Collective Amnesia Author: Kacey SW Date: Spring 2018 Language: en Topics: anarchist history, analysis Notes: [Milwaukee, Winter 2017/2018]
We are suffering from a collective amnesia around state repression and
recent history. With the resurgence of anti-fascism in the US and
growing appeal of anarchism, new people are being brought into our
circles who don't necessarily understand our recent history. If we want
to build a strong movement, we need to have a collective memory about
where we're coming from.
We're at a moment where people are increasingly turning to
anti-capitalism and realizing the pitfalls of working within the system.
If you're new to this world, welcome! There's a lot you should probably
know about how we got to where we are now. If you've been around
Anarchyland for a while, use this text as a way to note the patterns of
collective amnesia we often fall into and to help build a collective
memory to sustain a long-term anarchist movement.
Collective amnesia is when we forget the stories, victories, mistakes,
and debates of the recent past. It's when we allow security culture to
deteriorate and put ourselves and each other at risk unnecessarily. It's
when we think that the state doesn't take us seriously and when we don't
take our work seriously. It's when we don't share a common understanding
of where we came from as an anarchist movement. This is especially
dangerous for people who are new to these movements and circles, but
most of us seem to be suffering from this amnesia. This puts all of us
at risk of state repression and the inaction that comes with constantly
starting over with the same debates and mistakes.
In addition to the newly-radicalized people, there are always young
radicals joining our movements. Activist generations tend to be very
short, especially in an accelerated culture like the 21st century United
States. Recent high school grads were in elementary school during the
height of Occupy, and were in diapers during much of the summit-hopping
era. Even though our activist generation (we are mid-late 20's) wasn't
involved in the early summit-hopping era or the Green Scare, we had
access to a lot of people who were, and we had access to the media they
created. We knew what happened, we heard their stories, and it informed
how we built our movements. Something changed though, and it seems like
a lot of that knowledge hasn't been passed on. That's on us, and we want
to remedy that.
Part of the problem with having collective amnesia is "you don't know
what you don't know." Some people might not realize that there's a
reason to know specifics about Seattle '99 or Miami '03 or may not be
aware that those cities and years have any significance at all. The
people who organized in those times and places put in work to make sure
that their efforts were recorded and remembered. They created media and
shared their stories of resistance with us, but we could be doing better
at passing them on. This is encouragement for people to record their own
histories (without snitching on yourself) and to pass on recent
anarchist history. This is part of building a collective memory.
We're not only talking about collective amnesia as a movement-wide
thing, but also in our own practices and organizations. We find
ourselves forgetting the basics, particularly in the realm of security
culture and repression. We let things slip in the name of not seeming
paranoid because we don't want our behaviors to seem exaggerated as to
not weird out or turn off newcomers, but we know better, so we need to
do better.
We've come up with a few theories to explain our situation locally, if
not nationally.
First, we've (as authors and a general trend in Milwaukee anarchism)
shifted away from insurrectionary anarchism. A few years ago we knew
that our actions and rhetoric were going to catch the attention of the
state and could result in serious consequences. Now that we've largely
left that model behind for more “mass movement”-oriented organizing, it
feels like what we're doing isn't as dangerous. Secondly, a significant
number of people dedicated to the anarchist movement have moved away.
The "Great Migration" of anarchists out of the midwest hit Milwaukee
hard and our movement here looks very different than it did in 2010.
Most of the changes have been good, but we've lost a lot of continuity.
Many anarchists in Milwaukee today don't know what the movement looked
like more than a half decade ago. A significant amount of collective
knowledge has been lost.
Perhaps less locally, during the period when Anarchist News was our
major news source, we unironically referred to "the anarchist scene."
People saw it as a youth subculture rather than a political movement.
They "grew out" of anarchism and took their knowledge with them when
they moved on and joined “Society!” People also burned out and
depoliticized. When you're doing intense work, especially when you or
your friends are facing legal or other consequences, dropping out
becomes appealing. Sustained resistance takes energy, and when we don't
take care of comrades, we lose them.
Legal repression is another factor that takes people out of the
movement. People who are incarcerated, on papers, or at risk of
deportation face greater risks to continue involvement with
anti-capitalist resistance. The time, energy, and/or funds just simply
aren’t always available.
Losing people, whether to other cities, to burnout, or to prison, means
that we lose momentum. We aren't a big enough movement or community to
not take a hit when someone leaves. Starting fresh is exhausting.
We can't keep starting over and reinventing the wheel every time people
leave or enter the movement. Things like consensus, free speech, left
unity, and nonviolence have been debated ad nauseam for years. While
it's important to reassess things as situations change, at a certain
point we need to move forward, and people with different ideas can do
different work or work in different ways. We can't let ourselves get
stuck in this "analysis paralysis" or we end up being all talk and no
action. Of course we know that you can't pick a side when you don't know
what the sides are, so we offer these thoughts and a brief history to
give people somewhere to ground their debates, and to help people pick a
side and move forward.
Newer people might not realize we've hashed out these conversations a
million times before and that there's a culture and history behind the
conclusions we've reached. It's important that people consider the
different points in these ongoing debates, but ultimately moving forward
depends on choosing sides and acting.
Occupy is an example of what can happen when we hash out the same
debates for too long without moving forward. The broader Occupy movement
stalled out, stuck in discussions about decision-making and nonviolence
if they weren’t forcibly removed from their camps.
Here in Milwaukee, the conundrum existed of majority voting to decide on
a decision-making structure within the first few days of their
existence, thus illustrating the larger debate was functionally
meaningless because the question has been settled. Most people at the
occupations were new to non-electoral politics and weren't familiar with
nonhierarchical organizing. While some people learned about mutual aid,
consensus, and direct action through the encampments, many more became
frustrated or got bored and went home.
Another perpetual anarchist debate centers on the merits of working
through popular channels and social movements versus trying to drop out
of society and capitalism altogether. Anarchists have chosen their
sides, in any which way, on this already. When people show up and want
to rehash that debate, it detracts from actual organizing. We waste our
time justifying positions that have already been justified with years of
concrete wins or losses, because the people showing up don't realize
we've had these debates and consciously made these decisions already.
This goes from everything like glorifying train-hopping and
dumpster-diving as revolutionary praxis to dismissing and disavowing
movements because they lack formal organizational structure.
We recognize another facet of this collective amnesia that is perhaps
less serious, but still worth noting. Cultural references that we might
expect all US-based anarchists to know are not, in fact, common
knowledge. We grew up listening to Against Me!, debating Your Politics
are Boring as Fuck vs. Your Politics are Bougie as Fuck, voting for
"Society!" in every anarchistnews poll, and writing communiques about
uselessly displacing every trash can and paper box we encountered.
These in-jokes and references were collective knowledge in 2012, but
they aren't anymore. There are young anarchists today who weren't alive
🎵when it came time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window🎵 and
people who weren't aware of the existence of anything left of the
Democratic Party when Chris Hedges called us the "Cancer of Occupy". We
should consciously make certain cultural references part of our
collective memory, but we also need to ensure that our memory isn’t a
nostalgia acting as a gatekeeper for new anti-capitalists.
Collective amnesia is exhausting and dangerous. We can fight collective
amnesia by building a collective memory. We need a collective memory to
adapt our struggles, lest we end up with the "immortal science" of
creating endless front groups or more likely, a cliquey subculture full
of informal social hierarchy. We all need to remember our recent
history. We all need to remember what worked and what went wrong. We all
need to remember the ones we've lost to the state. We all need to
remember why we believe what we believe, and why we work the way we do.
We need to collectively remember this, so that we have a collective way
forward.
A lot of our experiences with building our collective anarchist memory
came through individual oral histories. We met people who'd done stuff,
and they told us about it. It was simple, but it wasn't necessarily
intentional. Passing on our histories as knowledge is critical for
sustaining long-term movements, so at the very least, we’ll lay out a
very brief contemporary history of anarchism in the United States.
As with any history, this will inevitably exclude some perspectives and
developments. We chose these based on our own experiences and
revolutionary political influences. Because we feel that each of these
phases in anarchism deserves its own history and full explanation, we’ll
leave it to the readers to research more information on these topics
they may be unfamiliar with. Our reasoning for starting our contemporary
timeline when we do is as simple as the fact that they are movements
which started when we were very young or that we heard the most about
when coming into the anti-capitalist movement.
-“Hacktivism” emerges as a method of social change. Though not
explicitly anarchist, hacktivism and hacker ethics tend to be
pro-democracy, anti-censorship, and organized in decentralized
anti-authoritarian models.
-As the environmentalist movement continues, so does the growing
influence of anarchism within it. Very notably, the Earth Liberation
Front (ELF) formed in the UK in 1992 based off of the model and strategy
employed by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) which was founded in 1976.
The ELF employs tactics of property destruction and other
“monkeywrenching” as methods of direct action to oppose practices that
are destructive to the environment and wilderness. Earth First!, an
organization started in the late 70's, begins to be more explicitly
anarchist around 1990. In the year 2000, the publication “Green Anarchy”
is started and develops environmentalism to specifically
“anarcho-primitivist” and “anti-civilization” thought.
-The 90’s, for anarchists, are also noted for the
“anti”/”alter”/”counter”-globalization movement. Large scale
mobilizations occurred from a variety of concerns in opposition to
neoliberalism which was either carried out or manifested from free trade
agreements and global institutions such as NAFTA (North American Free
Trade Agreement), the WTO (World Trade Organization), the IMF
(International Monetary Fund), and G8 (Group of Eight, later to
reincarnate as G7 or G20). As Anti-Flag says, “Seattle was a riot”, when
the WTO held their summit in Seattle of late 1999 and was met with
massive protests.
This “Battle of Seattle” was among the first times in U.S. history a
mass-scale black bloc tactic was applied and caught the attention of the
larger American public. The larger tactic of “summit-hopping”, or
protesting at the conventions of elites in order to shut them down (like
the organizations mentioned above but also the RNC and DNC among others)
is certainly not new nor a tactic specific to anarchists, but it is one
which continues to this day (and is also debated among anarchists).
George W. Bush gets elected; in the immediately following years, the
punk movement is furious enough in order to have Fat Mike release two
volumes of Rock Against Bush compilations, and even though hardly any
(if any) bands on there are specifically anarchist or communist, we all
buy it anyway… Jokes aside, in addition to all that was mentioned prior,
we found ourselves having to deal with two new bullshit wars as a "War
on Terrorism" started by the Bush administration in the early 2000’s.
-The anti-war movement forms. In response to the 9/11/2001 World Trade
Center attacks, the Bush administration led the U.S. government into a
war in Afghanistan, followed by another war in Iraq in March 2003 for
reasons having less to do with false allegations of "Weapons of Mass
Destruction" and more to do with oil money and crony-ism coupled with
military contracts. Anarchists, communists, and other peace activists
have consistently pushed an anti-imperialist/"troops out now" stance
against these wars, and the anti-war movement as a whole continued
through Bush's two terms.
-Summit protests continue as a trend. Miami 2003 will go down in history
as a lesson in police crowd control. Mass mobilization occurs against
the Republican National Convention (RNC) and to lesser extent but still
notable, the Democratic National Convention (DNC), and in 2008, eight
people would see trial as the “RNC 8” for terrorism charges. Through
these years, police tactics continue to develop into different forms of
crowd control while the state exercises its expanding legal definitions
of "terrorism".
-Around 2004 we saw the beginnings of Anonymous which, inspired by the
Guy Fawkes masks of the movie “V for Vendetta”, continued hacktivism
originally against Scientology, but later expanding into more projects
such as the group Lulzsec, the Operation AntiSec, and influence in the
-Student anti-austerity movement forms: Coming from the anti-war
movement was another student movement in the U.S. The year 2006 saw the
re-forming of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on many campuses
around the country as a predominantly anti-war organization (much like
the original SDS formed in 1960). Though appealing to liberals and a
"mass-base", the new SDS was largely directed by communists and
anarchists as an opposition to war, and then against tuition hikes,
university privatization, and other austerity measures imposed under the
excuse of the 2008 financial collapse.
In 2009, students in California responded to hikes in tuition and fees
in the form of student strikes and hard lockdown occupations, and such
tactics carried on elsewhere in the U.S. from 2009-2011. 2009 should
also be noted as seeing the English release of the critical text, The
Coming Insurrection, which played a significant role in informing the
thought and practice of many anarchists involved in the student movement
at this time.
Winter/Spring 2011 was of global note. Arab Spring uprisings around the
Middle East and North Africa coincided locally with the Budget Repair
Bill/Act 10 in Wisconsin. People in the Middle East threw off oppressive
leaders, and Wisconsinites occupied our capitol building for weeks to
protest a budget proposal that eliminated collective bargaining for
public employee unions.
-September 17, 2011: Occupy Wall Street began. Starting in New York and
spreading around the country and world, people occupied public spaces
with a diverse range of complaints, chiefly money in politics, corporate
greed, and rising income inequality. Encampments fizzled or were
brutally cleared, but the movement brought in many new people and gave
people experience with collective decision-making and direct action.
-Anti-Police Brutality/Anti-Racism: Anarchists have long been part of
anti-police and anti-racist movements (we trust the readers will see the
obvious link between these movements). The anarchist movement
particularly responded to various events regarding police and vigilantes
murdering unarmed black youth. In 2013 the Black Lives Matter movement
was created in response to the racist killing of Trayvon Martin. Even
though Black Lives Matter was not anarchist-lead by any means, several
uprisings and insurrections around the country used that slogan to
respond to racist vigilante and state violence, and anarchists and the
anarchist movement as a whole saw it fit to fight on those lines. Such
uprisings over police murder include Oakland 2009 (Oscar Grant),
Ferguson 2014 (Mike Brown), Baltimore 2015 (Freddie Gray), and Milwaukee
2016 (Sylville Smith) among others.
-Antifascism in the US: While groups like Anti-Racist Action have a long
history of directly confronting white supremacists, anti-fascism saw
widespread public visibility beginning in 2016 when we started learning
more about the alt-right. On January 20, 2017 Richard Spencer got
punched in the face and memed, and unfortunately, the Trump election
emboldened white supremacist hate crimes around the country. The left in
the US increasingly accepted anti-fascist tactics such as physical
confrontation, no-platforming fascists, and "we go where they go" as
necessary. By August, this consciousness entered the mainstream with the
murder of Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,
VA.
Along with this history of resistance, we need to remember the history
of repression. Going back generations, things like the red scare and the
Palmer raids are relatively well-recorded and well-known. While that
sort of large-scale repression is still worth knowing about, we also
need to remember more recent and localized repression and understand how
it's developed in order to build a solid security culture and to brace
for what may be coming.
A common tool of the state and capital to stop people from committing
crimes before they happen is the ubiquitous use of surveillance
technology. If people know they're constantly being watched, than the
logic goes that people will be less likely to engage in criminal
(anti-state/anti-capital) activity. Surveillance technology is of
course, also used to bring criminal charges and other consequences
against those engaging in revolutionary activity. This technology can
include security cameras, phone tapping, monitoring public online
activity, physical stalking, and more personally and intensely, the use
of informants.
Electronic technology has changed a lot in the last decade, and we
should continue to be cautious about discussing potentially illegal
activity in the vicinity of these tools. Where we used to take our
batteries out of our phones and take a walk in the woods or around the
park for serious discussion, many of us with smartphones are no longer
able to take the batteries out. When our phones and computers are around
us, we should continue to exercise serious caution and security. We need
to remember to take the old precautions, and to adapt them to newer
technologies. It's also important to stay up-to-date with tech security,
including encrypted messaging and VPNs, and to be aware of changing
police technology, like stingrays.
Doxxing is another increasingly common issue for anti-capitalists.
Political opponents find, compile, and publicize already-public
information as well as information obtained through hacking or stalking,
arrest records, and background report websites. This info can be used to
harass you or your family through phone calls, emails, or physical
presence. Your employer or school may be contacted and encouraged to
fire or expel you. It puts people at risk of physical violence and
emotional trauma. Reduce your risk of being doxxed by being mindful of
your digital footprint and removing any possible public records from the
internet.
Aside from harassment coming from the ultra-right and political
opponents, harassment can also come blatantly from the police, FBI, or
other agents of the state. Such harassment can take the form of phone
calls, online messages, or showing up to your home. This tactic of
repression is used to gain information about you, your comrades, or the
movement, and is also used as a form of intimidation to deter you from
organizing. Unfortunately, we've seen these tactics of harassment work
to intimidate or emotionally burden organizers out of the movement, so
we need to remember to fortify ourselves, communicate this repression
with our comrades, and stand up for each other lest more people feel
harassed and threatened enough to drop out.
Police arresting radicals at protests is nothing new nor uncommon. As a
tool of repression, it's a basic method of crowd control and burdening a
movement on a financial/legal level. As it is so basic and widespread,
we should enter demonstrations with preparation and the understanding
that arrests could take place. Understand, as much as possible, the risk
of arrest at any given action or event.
In the event that there's any risk of arrest, be prepared. Write a legal
support or a trusted comrade's phone number on your arm in permanent
marker so that you can call if you're arrested. Make sure a trusted
friend has a spare key, info about if/how to notify your employer or
family, and that any legal documents (ie child custody and immigration)
are accessible to your trusted contact. Preemptively build capacity for
jail and court support.
If you are arrested, remember that you have the right to remain silent,
and anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of
law. Never bring anything to a demonstration you aren't prepared to be
arrested with, and always carefully read through any documents you have
to sign before doing so, including simple arrest inventory documents. If
you are interrogated and held overnight, resist the pressure to answer
any questions posed by detectives regardless of how polite and "good
cop" they are acting.
A grand jury is a legal tool that has been used several times against
anarchists as a form of repression and information gathering. People may
be served subpoenas to testify at grand juries and give information to
the state regardless of whether or not the person who is served
committed a crime or has any information or not. Lawyers are not present
while you're being questioned. Refusing to answer questions at a grand
jury hearing can land you in jail for contempt.
The prosecutor may ask you questions about a crime committed, the
direction of the movement, or simply if you can confirm or deny knowing
individuals associated with the movement. Though you may receive jail
time for staying silent, it's crucial to never give any information in
order to protect our movements, our communities, and our friends. Part
of keeping out of such harm's way is to never film or document criminal
activity of another. If the state sees that you have information about a
crime being committed, whether or not you were participating, you may be
summoned to give up that information. The basic rule of "don't record"
not only protects others from state repression, but it protects you as
well.
Unfortunately, there's a history of people in the movement giving the
state information for their own personal gain. As the movement gains
traction and visibility, the state will increasingly employ undercover
officers. These people can pass along sensitive information, disrupt
organization through intentionally sowing division and distrust, and
more heinously, entrapping people to plan felonies without the intention
of these activities actually being carried out.
Brandon Darby is a recent, notable informant. He was active in the
Common Ground collective in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina. In 2007, he began working as an FBI informant. His politics
shifted increasingly to the right, and he infiltrated an affinity group
planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention protests.
Two people served 2-4 years in federal prison as a result of his
infiltration. He has since taken his time from helping the police to
working for Breitbart.
Entrapment occurs when undercover agents build relationships and trust
with radicals, and push them to commit crimes for which they are
pre-emptively arrested. In the case of Eric McDavid, an FBI informant
named "Anna" pretended to be in a romantic relationship with him and
provided information, money, and materials to build bombs. McDavid was
sentenced to 20 years, of which he served 9, despite never committing
any act of violence. He was only released after it was discovered that
the prosecution withheld 2500 pages of evidence. More insidiously,
undercover police officers in the UK have even fathered children with
people they were targeting.
We can't be paranoid, but we need to be safe. Know your friends. Know
their history. Be calculating in the risks you take, and who you take
them with.
Raids are a key way for the state to forcibly gather evidence for
prosecution. While often times we associate raids with drug busts, raids
on homes and social spaces have happened enough times to radicals that
we should always remember this tactic as a possibility. If police try to
enter your house or social space, never let them in without a warrant,
and even then, be mindful about what materials or information you are
keeping in that location.
Incarceration is a possible result of any of the above repression
tactics. It's an easy way for the state to physically and forcibly
remove people from their communities. Incarceration is virtually always
political; if everyone who committed any crime was actually punished to
the fullest extent, we wouldn’t see prisons so disproportionately filled
with people of color. Incarceration is used as a political tool to
target specific communities. We are at risk because we don't recognize
the legitimacy of the legal system or the state. We should be mindful of
this risk when we organize. Regardless of the precautions we take,
there's always a risk of getting caught or being framed. We need to be
ready to support people behind bars.
Sometimes, part of repression is getting the shit kicked out of you.
Protest policing (and policing in general) can be extremely violent.
Beatings, shootings, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, bean bag
rounds, flashbangs, LRADs, sexual assault, invasive searches,
dehydration, hunger, withholding medical care, refusing bathroom access,
handcuff injuries, rough rides, using horses/dogs as weapons, using
vehicles as weapons, etc... When possible, we need to anticipate police
violence and prepare accordingly.
Government seeks to hold a monopoly on violence. Sometimes this extends
to the realm of politically-motivated assassination. While not
explicitly anarchists, three activists from Ferguson have been found
dead in suspicious circumstances since the insurrection. One is
controversially being called suicide, but the other two were found with
gunshot wounds to the head in burning cars. Apart from the sketchy
murders of rebels against the racist police state in our contemporary
climate, there's also a history of the state using blatant legal tactics
to murder organizers via witch-hunts and death sentences dating much
further back than the infamous Haymarket 1886 incident.
In addition to state violence, anti-fascists are also at an increased
risk of violence from the far right. In 2015, five people were shot by
white supremacists while occupying the Fourth Precinct Police Station in
Minneapolis in protest of the police killing of Jamar Clark. On January
20, 2017 Joshua Dukes, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World
and the General Defense Committee of the IWW was shot by a right-wing
extremist while protesting a Milo Yiannopoulos speech in Seattle. In
August 2017 Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlottesville while
protesting the Unite the Right rally.
Our movement's worries and considerations of serious violence ebb and
flow through the years and decades, and at the time of writing this, we
feel we should take stronger consideration regarding the level of
violence we face. The goal in mentioning such atrocities against
revolutionaries isn't to make ourselves paranoid nor afraid, but to
illustrate concrete examples of the ways the state and its supporters
will attempt to defeat us.
We've gone through the ways the state uses blatant tactics of oppression
to achieve their political ends, but we'd also like to mention
recuperation as a method the state and capital use to diminish our
movements. "Recuperation" in this sense refers to radical or potentially
revolutionary movements becoming commodified, watered down, or absorbed
into the systems and institutions we're fighting against. A strong and
noteworthy example of this is what happened with the Wisconsin Uprising.
The uprising went from wildcat strikes, occupations, and a call for a
statewide general strike to Democrats and liberals turning the uprising
to electoral politics, and eventually sucking all the revolutionary
momentum out if it while pouring energy into a failed recall election.
In other cases, recuperation can look like activists and organizers
trying to work within the system and ending up running for local office
or becoming part of the non-profit industrial complex.
As our movement accelerates, it's crucial that we remember where our
politics come from. As we welcome new people, we need to rebuild this
collective memory, so that we can effectively face down current and
future repression while building a movement that adapts to technological
and social changes.
Ten years ago, we never thought we'd be seeing anti-fascists openly shot
at in the streets, but we also never thought that this many people would
be with us. Repression is serious as fuck, but we can push through, like
we always have, as long as we remember where we're coming from and
maintain the vision of where we're going. Because our broad
anti-authoritarian movement is an amorphous collective, it's easier than
not for amnesia to set in, but with keeping good culture and being
conscious of this fact, trying to remember, re-learn, and teach our
history is an obstacle that we can overcome.
The state will try to crush us, capital will try to subsume us, but when
we feel personal attachment to our collective history and when we enable
others to feel attached to the history, then no threat, door knock, or
beating can separate us from ourselves and from the movement for freedom
and equality.