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Title: The SHAC Model Author: Crimethinc., anonymous Date: March 28th, 2009 Language: en Topics: SHAC, strategy, animal liberation, ALF, organizing Source: Retrieved on January 1nd, 2015 from http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2009/03/28/new-feature-the-shac-model/
“We were aware of the activists, but I don’t think we understood exactly
to what lengths they would go.”
–Warren Stevens, on dropping a $33 million loan to Huntingdon Life
Sciences despite having vowed never to do so, following rioting at his
offices in Little Rock and vandalism of his property
“The number of activists isn’t huge, but their impact has been
incredible . . . There needs to be an understanding that this is a
threat to all industries.
The tactics could be extended to any other sectors of the economy.”
–Brian Cass, managing director of HLS
“Where all animal welfare and most animal rights groups insist on
working within the legal boundaries of society, animal liberationists
argue that the state is irrevocably corrupt and that legal approaches
alone will never win justice for the animals.”
–ALF Press Office
Over the past decade, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty—SHAC—has waged an
international direct action campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences,
Europe’s largest contract animal testing corporation. By targeting
investors and business partners of HLS, SHAC repeatedly brought HLS to
the brink of collapse, and it took direct assistance from the British
government and an international counter-campaign of severe legal
repression to keep the corporation afloat.
In the wake of this campaign, there was talk of applying the SHAC model
in other contexts, such as environmental defense and anti-war
organizing. But what is the SHAC model, precisely? What are its
strengths and limitations? Is it, in fact, an effective model? If so,
for what?
Viewed from outside, the animal rights milieu can be confusing, even for
other radicals. On one hand, the intense focus on this single issue can
contribute to an insular mindset, if not outright myopia; on the other
hand, there are countless animal liberation activists who see their
efforts as part of a larger struggle against all forms of oppression.
Those not familiar with the inner workings of the milieu often conflate
the positions of opposing factions. At the risk of oversimplifying, it
is possible to identify three distinct schools of thought:
Animal Welfare–The idea that animals should be treated with mercy and
compassion, especially when they are used for human benefit such as food
production. For example, some animal welfare advocates lobby the
government for more humane slaughter laws.
Example: the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS)
Animal Rights–The idea that animals have their own interests and deserve
legislation to protect them. Those who believe in animal rights often
maintain vegan diets and oppose the use of animals for entertainment,
experimentation, food, or clothing. While they may participate in
protests or civil disobedience, they also generally believe in working
within the system, through lobbying, marketing, outreach, and use of the
corporate media.
Example: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
Animal Liberation–The idea that animals should not be domesticated or
held in captivity. Since this is not possible within the logic of the
current social and economic system, animal liberationists often tend
towards anarchism, and may break laws in order to rescue animals or to
preserve habitat.
Example: the Animal Liberation Front (ALF)[1]
Many groups focused on animal welfare and animal rights have criticized
those who engage in direct action, arguing that such actions hurt the
image of animal advocates and alienate potential sympathizers. It’s also
possible to interpret this criticism as motivated by the economic
inducement of building up a wealthy membership base and the fear of
running afoul of government repression. In addition to denouncing direct
action, prohibiting their employees from interacting with those who
countenance it, and pulling out of conferences including more militant
speakers, organizations such as HSUS have gone so far as to laud the FBI
for cracking down on animal liberation efforts. In 2008, HSUS
ostentatiously offered a $2500 reward to anyone providing information
leading to the conviction of persons involved with an arson alleged by
the FBI to be the work of animal rights activists.
The SHAC campaign originated in Britain, following a series of
successful closures of laboratory animal breeders involving tactics from
picketing to ALF raids and clashes with the police. Video footage shot
covertly inside HLS in 1997 was aired on British television, showing
staff shaking, punching, and shouting at beagles in an HLS lab. PETA
stopped organizing protests against HLS after being threatened with
legal action, and SHAC formed to take over the campaign in November
1999.
Huntingdon Life Sciences was a more formidable target than any
individual animal breeder; the SHAC campaign constituted an escalation
in animal rights activism in Britain. The idea was to focus specifically
on the corporation’s finances, utilizing the tactics that had closed
small businesses to shut down an entire corporation. Activists set out
to isolate HLS by harassing anyone involved with any corporation that
did business with them. The role of SHAC as an organization was simply
to distribute information about potential targets and report on actions
as they occurred.
In January 2000, British activists publicized a list of the largest
shareholders in HLS, including those who held shares through third
parties for anonymity—one of which was Britain’s Labour Party. Following
two weeks of pitched demonstrations, many shareholders sold their
holdings; finally, 32 million shares were placed on the London Stock
Exchange for one penny each and HLS stocks crashed. In the ensuing
chaos, the Royal Bank of Scotland wrote off an ÂŁ11.6 million loan in
exchange for a payment of just ÂŁ1 in order to distance itself from the
company, and the British government arranged for the state-owned Bank of
England to give them an account because no other bank would do business
with them. The company’s share price, worth around £300 in the 1990s,
fell to ÂŁ1.75 in January 2001, stabilizing at 3 pence by mid-2001.
On December 21, 2000, HLS was dropped from the New York Stock Exchange;
three months later, it lost its place on the main platform of the London
Stock Exchange as well. HLS was only saved from bankruptcy when its
largest remaining shareholder, the American investment bank Stephens,
gave the company a $15 million loan. This chapter of the story closed
with HLS moving its financial center to the United States to take
advantage of US laws allowing greater anonymity for shareholders.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the anti-fur campaigns that had
characterized much of 1990s animal rights organizing had plateaued; the
tactics of civil disobedience developed in those campaigns had reached a
point of diminishing returns, and many activists were casting around for
new targets and strategies. One faction of the animal rights movement,
exemplified by groups like Vegan Outreach and DC Compassion Over
Killing,[2] moved on to promoting veganism. More militant activists
sought other points of departure. Some, like Kevin Kjonaas, who went on
to become president of SHAC USA, had been in Britain and witnessed the
apex of the British SHAC campaign, just as anti-globalization activists
visiting Britain in the 1990s had brought back heady tales of Reclaim
the Streets actions.
The US SHAC campaign came out of conversations between animal rights
activists in different parts of the country. While the vegan outreach
campaign sought to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to
win over consumers, SHAC attracted militants who wanted to make the most
efficient use of their individual efforts. Some reasoned that it was
unlikely that the entire market base for animal products would be won
over to veganism, especially insofar as people tend to be defensive
about their lifestyle choices, but practically everyone could agree that
punching puppies is inexcusable.
SHAC USA got started in January 2001, just as Stephens, Inc. saved HLS
from bankruptcy. Stephens was based in Little Rock, Arkansas, so a
number of activists moved there to organize. In April, 14 beagles were
liberated from the new HLS lab in New Jersey; at the end of October,
hundreds of people gathered in Little Rock for a weekend of
demonstrations at Warren Stephens’ home and the offices of Stephens,
Inc. By the following spring, Stephens had ditched HLS, breaking off a
five-year contract after only one year.
Unrivaled by any campaign of comparable scale and effectiveness, SHAC
took off quickly in the US. Thanks in part to superior funding,[3] the
propaganda was colorful and exciting, as were promotional videos that
juxtaposed heart-wrenching clips of animal cruelty with inspiring
demonstration footage to a pulse-racing soundtrack of techno music. The
campaign offered participants a wide range of options, including civil
disobedience, office disruptions, property destruction, call-ins,
pranks, tabling, and home demonstrations. In contrast to the heyday of
anti-globalization summit-hopping, targets were available all around the
country, limited only by activists’ imaginations and research. The
intermediate goals of forcing specific investors and business partners
to disconnect from HLS were often easily accomplished, providing
immediate gratification to participants.
Whereas an individual might feel insignificant at an antiwar march of
thousands, if she was one of a dozen people at a home demonstration that
caused an investor to pull out, she could feel that she had personally
accomplished something concrete. The SHAC campaign offered the kind of
sustained low-intensity conflict through which people can become
radicalized and develop a sense of collective power. Running in black
blocs with friends, evading police after demonstrations, listening to
inspirational speeches together, walking through offices yelling on
bullhorns, reading other activists’ reports online, the feeling of being
on the winning side of an effective liberation struggle—all these
contributed to the seemingly unstoppable momentum of the SHAC campaign.
“Carr Securities began marketing the Huntingdon Life Sciences stock. The
next day, the Manhasset Bay Yacht Club, to which certain Carr executives
reportedly belong, was vandalized by animal rights activists. The
extremists sent a claim of responsibility to the SHAC website, and three
days after the incident, Carr terminated its business relationship with
HLS.”
–John Lewis, Deputy Assistant Director FBI Oversight on so-called
“Eco-terrorism”
Direct action against those doing business with HLS has taken many
forms, occasionally escalating to arson and violence. In February 2001,
HLS managing director Brian Cass was hospitalized after being attacked
with axe handles at his home. That July, the Pirates for Animal
Liberation sank the yacht of a Bank of New York executive, and the bank
soon severed ties with the lab. A year later, smoke bombs were set off
at the offices of Marsh Corp. in Seattle, causing the evacuation of the
high rise and their disassociation from HLS. In fall of 2003, incendiary
devices were left at Chiron and Shaklee corporations for their
contracting with HLS. In 2005, Vancouver-based brokerage Canaccord
Capital announced that it had dropped a client, Phytopharm PLC, in
response to the ALF firebombing of a car belonging to a Canaccord
executive; Phytopharm had been doing business with HLS. All this took
place against a backdrop of constant smaller-scale actions.
In December 2006, HLS was prevented from being listed on the New York
Stock Exchange, an unprecedented development that resulted in a full
page ad in the New York Times portraying a masked, apparently
leather-jacketed caricature of an activist declaring “I control Wall
Street.”[4] In 2007, eight companies dropped HLS, including their two
biggest investors, AXA and Wachovia, following home demonstrations and
ALF visits to executives’ houses. In 2008, incendiary devices were left
under Staples trucks and Staples outlets were vandalized. About 250
companies altogether have dropped in the course of the campaign,
including Citibank, the world’s largest financial institution; HSBC, the
world’s largest bank; Marsh, the world’s largest insurance broker; and
Bank of America.
It’s interesting to compare the arc of the SHAC campaign to that of the
so-called anti-globalization movement. Both took off in Britain before
catching on in the United States. SHAC was founded in England the same
month as the historic WTO protests in Seattle; it got going in North
America at the tail end of the anti-globalization surge, and maintained
momentum after the US wing of the anti-globalization movement collapsed
in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
How was the SHAC campaign able to maintain momentum while practically
every other direct action-based campaign foundered or was co-opted by
liberals? Can we derive lessons about how to weather crises from its
example?
SHAC activists differed from participants in most other social movements
in that they neither perceived themselves to need positive press
coverage nor regarded negative press coverage as a bad thing. Their goal
was to terrify corporations out of doing business with HLS, not to win
converts to the animal rights movement. The more fearsome and crazy they
appeared in the media, the easier it was to intimidate potential
investors and business partners. Activists in other circles feared that
the terrorism scare would make it easy for the government to isolate
them by portraying them as dangerous extremists; for SHAC, the more
dangerous and extreme they appeared, the better.
All this came back to haunt them in the end, when the most influential
organizers went to trial and it was easy for the prosecution to frame
them as representatives of a frankly terroristic underground. In this
regard, the greatest strengths of the SHAC campaign—the relationship
between public and covert organizing, the fearsome reputation—also
proved to be its Achilles heel. The lesson seems to be that this
approach can be effective on a small scale, so long as organizers do not
provoke a confrontation with forces much stronger than themselves.
In addition to the matter of press coverage, it may be instructive to
look at the way SHAC organizers framed the issues. SHAC spokespeople
never backed down from emphasizing the necessity of direct action for
animal liberation, even when the rest of the nation was fixated on Al
Qaeda; the historic mobilization in Little Rock took place only a month
and a half after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Regardless of what happened in New York or Afghanistan, they emphasized
that there were animals suffering at that very moment, who could be
spared if people took a few concrete steps. Had organizers in other
circles been able to maintain this kind of focus and urgency, history
might have taken a different turn at the beginning of this decade.
It’s possible, also, that with other forms of organizing at a lower ebb,
SHAC picked up more participants than it would have if other direct
action campaigns had maintained momentum. In contrast to the massive
symbolic actions of the antiwar movement, the SHAC campaign was a hotbed
of experimentation, in which new tactics were constantly being tested.
For direct action enthusiasts concerned with making the most of their
efforts—or simply bored with being treated as a number in a crowd
estimate—it must have been seductive by comparison.
Whatever the cause, the SHAC campaign was able to maintain momentum
until federal repression finally began to take its toll. Unlike many
campaigns, which have faded due to attrition or cooptation, it took the
full power of the state to check its advance.
All the accomplishments of the SHAC campaign came at a price. The more
businesses dropped relations with HLS, the more attention the campaign
attracted from law enforcement agencies and right wing think tanks. SHAC
organizers in general were not an easily intimidated breed; it was
common for participants in the campaign to joke about all the lawsuits
and injunctions they had racked up and how little it mattered if they
were sued as they had no money anyway.
The US and British governments ratcheted up repression steadily over the
years, placing activists under surveillance, hitting them with lawsuits,
blocking their fundraising efforts, intimidating organizations like PETA
out of interacting with them, passing new laws against demonstrations in
residential neighborhoods, and shutting down their websites. This
culminated in the US with the trial of the so-called SHAC 7: six
organizers and the SHAC USA corporation itself.
On May 26, 2004, Lauren Gazzola, Jake Conroy, Josh Harper, Kevin
Kjonaas, Andrew Stepanian, and Darius Fullmer were indicted on various
federal charges for their alleged roles in the campaign. Teams of FBI
agents in riot gear invaded their homes at dawn, threatening them and
their pets with guns and handcuffing their relatives. The investigation
leading up to the arrest was reportedly the FBI’s largest investigation
of 2003; court documents confirm that wiretap intercepts in the
investigation outnumbered the intercepted communications of that year’s
second largest investigation 5 to 1.
The defendants were all charged with violating the Animal Enterprise
Protection Act, a controversial law intended to punish anyone who
disrupts a corporation that profits from animal exploitation; some were
also charged with interstate stalking and other offenses. The defendants
were never charged with engaging personally in any threatening acts; the
government based its case on the notion that they should be held
responsible for all the illegal actions taken to further the SHAC
campaign, regardless of their involvement. They were found guilty on
March 2, 2006, sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to six years,
and ordered to pay tremendous quantities of money to HLS.
The SHAC 7 trial was clearly intended to set a precedent for targeting
public organizers of campaigns that include covert action; its
repercussions were felt as far away as England. In 2005, the British
government passed the “Serious Organized Crime and Police Act”
specifically to protect animal research organizations. On May 1, 2007,
after a series of raids involving 700 police officers in England,
Holland, and Belgium, 32 people linked to SHAC were arrested, including
Heather Nicholson and Greg and Natasha Avery, among the founders of SHAC
in Britain. In January 2009, seven of them were sentenced to prison
terms between four and eleven years.
Despite all these setbacks, the SHAC campaign continues to this day,
though it faces serious challenges in the United States. Some regional
organizations are still active, and autonomous actions continue to
occur, but there is no nationwide organizing body, no newsletter, no
reliable website to publicize targets and action reports. Consequently,
there is less strategic targeting, less outreach and networking, and a
lack of national events. The upside is that it has become more difficult
for companies to figure out who to subpoena or seek injunctions
against—but that’s a narrow silver lining.
This downturn can be attributed to government repression in general and
the SHAC 7 trial specifically. Fear of legal repercussions has increased
at the same time as key organizers have been taken out of action. With
new local laws prohibiting residential picketing, and the Animal
Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006 making interstate tertiary targeting
illegal, many tactics that once involved little risk are no longer
feasible. Now that more public forms of organizing are being more
aggressively punished, it seems possible that the next generation of
animal liberation activists will focus more on clandestine tactics. One
of the strongest features of the SHAC campaign was the combination of
public and clandestine approaches, so this is not necessarily good news
for the movement.
It’s actually quite surprising that HLS is still in existence; half a
decade ago, SHAC organizers must have been banking on already having won
by this point. When Stephens, Inc. divested, their loans were all that
kept HLS running; it was only the British government intervening again
that enabled HLS to negotiate a refinancing and continue. Essentially,
SHAC did win, only to have its victory stolen away. The same situation
recurred when SHAC forced Marsh Inc. to break off ties, and HLS was
faced with the prospect of operating without the insurance mandated by
law. Again, the British government intervened, and HLS was given
unprecedented coverage by the Department of Trade and Industry. Without
this protection from the very pinnacle of power, HLS would be long
gone—but that’s precisely why governments exist: to protect corporations
and preserve the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy. Perhaps
it was naĂŻve to believe that the governments of Britain and the USA
would permit even the fiercest animal liberation campaign to run an
influential corporation out of business.
One can’t fight like there’s no tomorrow indefinitely, and the repeated
return of HLS from the dead must have been maddening for long-term SHAC
organizers who staked everything again and again on one final push.
Participants disagree as to how significant a factor burnout has been,
but it would be foolish to rule it out. The SHAC campaign has been
oriented towards full-time activism from the beginning, the mindset
being that, as HLS employees work full time, their opponents must work
at least that hard. Newsletter articles such as the “SHACtivist workout
routine” indicate a high-pressure approach that probably correlates with
a high rate of burnout. In any case, as difficult as it may be to
distinguish the effects of burnout from those of fear, many activists
have indeed dropped out of SHAC without moving on to other campaigns.
SHAC is currently active in mainland Europe and Latin America, and
unrelenting in Britain. The British SHAC campaign may offer a better
model for how to handle federal repression; from this vantage point, it
appears that British activists were prepared in advance for it, had
people ready to take over for central organizers, and were more open to
new people getting involved. But Britain is more densely populated than
much of the United States and has a richer history of animal rights
organizing, so it is unfair to compare the two campaigns too closely.
Will SHAC ultimately succeed in shutting down HLS? It’s still possible,
though it looks less likely than it did a few years ago. Some still feel
that the most important thing is to close HLS at all costs, to win an
historic victory that will inspire activists and terrify executives for
decades to come. Others think that, whether or not HLS shuts down, SHAC
has served its purpose, demonstrating the strengths and limitations of a
new model for anticapitalist organizing.
When people think of SHAC, they picture demonstrations at the homes of
employees and investors; some anarchists mean nothing more than this
when they refer to the “SHAC model.” But home demonstrations are merely
incidental to the formula that has enabled SHAC to wreak such havoc upon
HLS. To understand what made the campaign effective, we have to look at
all its essential characteristics together.
• Secondary and tertiary targeting:[5] The SHAC campaign set about
depriving HLS of its support structure. Just as a living organism
depends on an entire ecosystem for the resources and relationships it
needs to survive, a corporation cannot function without investors and
business partners. In this regard, more so than any standard boycott,
property destruction, or publicity campaign, SHAC confronted HLS on the
terms most threatening to a corporation. Starbucks could easily afford a
thousand times the cost of the windows smashed by the black bloc during
the Seattle WTO protests, but if no one would replace those windows—or
the windows had been broken at the houses of investors, so no one would
invest in the corporation—it would be another story. SHAC organizers
made a point of learning the inner workings of the capitalist economy,
so they could strike most strategically.
Secondary and tertiary targeting works because the targets do not have a
vested interest in continuing their involvement with the primary target.
There are other places they can take their business, and they have no
reason not to do so. This is a vital aspect of the SHAC model. If a
business is cornered, they’ll fight to the death, and nothing will
matter in the conflict except the pure force each party is able to bring
to bear on the other; this is not generally to the advantage of
activists, as corporations can bring in the police and government. This
is why, apart from the axe handle incident, so few efforts in the SHAC
campaign have been directed at HLS itself. Somewhere between the primary
target and the associated corporations that provide its support
structure, there appears to be a fulcrum where action is most effective.
It might seem strange to go after tertiary targets that have no
connection to the primary target themselves, but countless HLS customers
have dropped relations after a client of theirs was embarrassed.
• Complementary relationship between public and underground organizing:
More than any other direct action campaign in recent history, the SHAC
campaign achieved a perfect symbiosis of public organizing and
underground action. To this end, the campaign was characterized by an
extremely savvy use of technology and modern networking. The SHAC
websites disseminated information about targets and provided a forum for
action reports to raise morale and expectations, enabling anyone
sympathetic to the goals of the campaign to play a part without drawing
attention to themselves.
• Diversity of tactics: Rather than pitting exponents of different
tactics against each other, SHAC integrated all possible tactics into
one campaign, in which each approach complemented the others. This meant
that participants could choose from a practically limitless array of
options, which opened the campaign to a wide range of people and averted
needless conflicts.
• Concrete targets, concrete motivations: The fact that there were
specific animals suffering, whose lives could be saved by specific
direct action, made the issues concrete and lent the campaign a sense of
urgency that translated into a willingness on the part of participants
to push themselves out of their comfort zones. Likewise, at every
juncture in the SHAC campaign, there were intermediate goals that could
easily be accomplished, so the monumental task of undermining an entire
corporation never felt overwhelming.
This contrasts sharply with the way momentum in certain green anarchist
circles died off after the turn of the century, when the goals and
targets became too expansive and abstract. It had been easy for
individuals to motivate themselves to defend specific trees and natural
areas, but once the point for some participants was to “destroy
civilization” and everything less was mere reformism, it was impossible
to work out what constituted meaningful action.
When the model pioneered by SHAC is applied correctly, its advantages
are obvious. It hits corporations where they are most vulnerable:
corporations do not do what they do because of ethical commitments or in
order to obtain a certain public image, but in single-minded pursuit of
profit, and the SHAC model focuses exclusively on making corporate
wrongdoings unprofitable. In terms of building and maintaining a
long-running direct action campaign, the SHAC model offers direction and
motivation for participants, providing a framework for concrete rather
than symbolic actions. The SHAC model sidesteps conflicts over tactics,
offering the opportunity for activists of a range of abilities and
comfort levels to work together. In establishing a wide array of
targets, it gives activists the opportunity to pick the time, place, and
character of their actions, rather than constantly reacting to their
opponents. Above all, the SHAC model is efficient: SHAC USA has never
had more than a few hundred active participants at any given time.
In contrast to most current organizing strategies, the SHAC model is an
offensive approach. It offers a means of attacking and defeating
established capitalist projects—of taking the initiative rather than
simply responding to the advance of corporate power. SHAC did not set
out to block the construction of a new animal testing facility or the
passage of new legislation, but to defeat and destroy an animal testing
corporation that had existed for decades.
The SHAC model demands and fosters a culture that not only celebrates
direct action but constantly engages in it, encouraging participants to
push their own limits. This contrasts sharply with certain so-called
insurrectionist circles, in which anarchists talk a lot about rioting
and resistance without engaging in day-to-day confrontations with the
powers that be. Anti-globalization activists in Chicago sometimes asked
SHAC organizers to lead chants at their protests, as the latter had a
reputation for being boisterous and energetic: those who cut their teeth
in the SHAC campaign, if they have not dropped out of direct action
organizing entirely, are equipped to be effective in a wide range of
contexts.
A subtler strength of the SHAC approach is that it draws on class
tensions that are usually submerged in the United States. Activists from
lower middle- and working-class backgrounds can find it gratifying to
confront wealthy executives on their own turf. This also exposes
single-issue activists to the interconnections of the ruling class. In
visiting the houses of executives, one discovers that all the
pharmaceutical and investment corporations are intertwined: they all own
shares of each other’s companies, sit on each other’s boards, and live
in identical suburban mansions in sprawling gated communities.
Finally, the SHAC model took advantage of opportunities offered by
larger events and communities. Home demonstrations were often organized
to take place after a conference or show; the ubiquity of potential
targets meant there was always one close at hand. For several years
running, SHAC demonstrations took place during the National Conference
on Organized Resistance in Washington, DC, and they also occurred
following anti-biotech protests in Philadelphia and Chicago. Though
these sometimes provoked conflicts with other organizers, it only takes
a couple dozen people to make an effective home demonstration, so it was
always easy to pull one together.
SHAC itself tended to create and propagate a subculture of its own,
complete with internal reference points and rituals. At conferences and
major mobilizations activists compared notes about investors, local
campaigns, and legal troubles. Sympathetic music scenes helped fund
organizing and introduced new blood to the campaign. It would be
difficult to imagine the SHAC campaign in the USA without the hardcore
scene of the past two decades, which has consistently served as a social
base for the militant animal rights movement. There are certainly
drawbacks to identifying a campaign too closely with a specific
youth-oriented subculture, but it is better to draw participants and
momentum from at least one community than from none at all.
Some anarchists have thoughtlessly charged SHAC with reformism. This is
absurd: SHAC’s goal is not to change the way HLS conducts itself, but to
shut it down. It is more precise to describe SHAC as an abolitionist
campaign: not being able to bring about the end of animal exploitation
in one fell blow, it seeks to accomplish the most ambitious but feasible
step toward that end. Similarly, certain idle critics deride animal
liberation efforts on the grounds that they are “activism,” with the
implication that this is a bad thing in and of itself. Those who adopt
this position should go ahead and acknowledge that they are unmoved by
the oppression of their fellow living creatures and see no value in
attempting to put an end to it—that is to say, they are hardly
anarchists.
Spurious critiques aside, the SHAC model has some real limitations,
which deserve examination.
First, there are certain prerequisites without which it will fail. For
example, the SHAC model cannot succeed outside a setting in which direct
action is regularly applied. All the strategic thinking in the world is
worthless if no one is actually willing to act. In the militant animal
rights milieu, the issues at stake are felt to be concrete and poignant
enough that participants are motivated to take risks on a regular basis;
without this motivation, the SHAC campaign would not have gotten off the
ground. Likewise, the SHAC model is powerless against a target that does
not depend on secondary and tertiary targets, or has an endless supply
of them to choose from. Above all, the secondary and tertiary targets
must have somewhere else to take their business—the SHAC model relies on
the rest of the capitalist market to offer better options. In this
regard, while it is not reformist, neither does it provide a strategy
for taking on capitalism itself.
Secondly, as effective as they might be in purely economic terms,
secondary and tertiary targeting locate the site of confrontation far
from the cause for which the participants are fighting. Generally
speaking, the more abstract the object of a campaign feels, the worse
for morale. Much of the vitality of eco-defense struggles in the 1980s
and ’90s came from the immediate, visceral connection forest defenders
experienced with the land they were occupying; when environmental
activism began shifting to more urban terrain a decade ago, it lost some
of its impetus. It is perhaps specific to the SHAC campaign that
participants have been able to maintain their outrage and audacity so
far from the object of their concern; it is risky to assume this will
always occur in other contexts.
Apart from these challenges, the SHAC model may be ineffective precisely
because of its effectiveness. Is it realistic to set out to shut down
powerful corporations, or will the government always intercede? It may
be that in posing a threat to corporations in the economic terms they
take most seriously, the SHAC model picks a fight it cannot win. Once
the government is involved in a conflict, it takes more than a tight
network of militants to win—it takes an entire large-scale social
movement, and the SHAC approach alone cannot give rise to such a thing.
In this regard, the SHAC model’s greatest strength is also a fatal flaw.
Time will tell if HLS was too ambitious a target; the corporation might
still collapse. Even so, it would probably be wise for the next ones who
experiment with the model to set smaller goals, rather than even more
ambitious ones, since the SHAC campaign itself has yet to succeed.
Perhaps some unexplored middle ground awaits between shutting down
individual fur stores and attempting to close Europe’s largest animal
testing corporation.
This is not to say that the SHAC model is useless if it does not result
in the closure of the target. Sometimes it is worth fighting a losing
battle so as to discourage an opponent from starting another battle;
other times, even in losing one can gain valuable experience and allies.
Ironically, the SHAC model may be more effective for recruiting people
to direct action organizing than for its professed goal—precisely
because, in bypassing recruitment to focus on other goals, it attracts
participants who are serious and committed.
But if the point is to bring more people into direct action organizing
rather than simply to shut down a single corporation, there are
significant drawbacks to the SHAC model, too—for example, the high
stress levels and likelihood of burnout. In this regard, it is not
necessarily an advantage that the SHAC model teaches activists to think
in the same terms as capitalist economists—efficiency, finances, chain
of command—rather than prioritizing the social skills necessary to build
long-term communities of resistance.
Likewise, in focusing on secondary and tertiary targeting, the SHAC
model emphasizes and rewards an aggressive attitude that is less
advantageous in other situations. What are the long-term psychological
effects on organizers who spend half a decade or more screaming over a
bullhorn at employees in their homes? What kind of people are drawn to a
campaign that consists primarily of making other people miserable? It
cannot go unsaid that some anarchists have reported frustrating
interactions with SHAC organizers.
Considering the model from an anarchist perspective—to what extent does
the SHAC approach tend to consolidate or undermine hierarchies? The
secure organizing necessary for clandestine direct action can promote a
cliquishness than intensifies as repression increases, thus preventing a
campaign from drawing in new participation when it needs it most.
Informal hierarchies plague organizing of all kinds; in the case of the
SHAC campaign, those who do the research often have disproportionate
influence over the direction of a campaign and end up making judgment
calls with far-reaching effects.
It could be argued that the single-issue focus and goal-oriented nature
of the SHAC campaign deprioritizes addressing forms of hierarchy other
than the oppression of animals. It is no secret that some SHAC
organizing groups have been wracked by conflicts over gender dynamics[6]
and some participants have not always been held accountable for their
behavior. In a campaign that emphasizes victory above all else, this
should not be surprising—if the most important thing is to win, it’s
easy to put off addressing internal conflicts, especially with the added
stress of federal repression. Inevitably, the people who have bad
experiences drop out of the campaign, taking with them the criticism
others need to hear.
These questionable priorities have also manifested themselves in certain
tasteless tactics. In one instance, a target who was struggling to
escape alcoholism received a can of beer with a nasty note; in another,
a woman’s underwear was stolen and reportedly put up for sale. Utilizing
the power imbalances of patriarchal society to target accomplices in the
oppression of animals hardly sets an example of struggle against all
forms of domination.
There are other ethical questions about secondary and tertiary
targeting. Is it acceptable to risk frightening or injuring secretaries,
children, and other uninvolved parties? What distinguishes anarchists
from governments and other terrorists, if not the refusal to countenance
collateral damage?
In essence, the SHAC model is a blueprint for a campaign of coercion, to
be used in situations in which there is no other possible accountability
process. This does not conflict with anarchist values—when an oppressor
refuses to be accountable for his actions, it is necessary to compel him
to stop, and this extends to those who aid and abet him as well. But
targeting people who are not themselves involved in oppression muddies
the waters. When an organizer publicizes a target, there is no telling
what actions others will carry out. Perhaps the value of ending animal
exploitation outweighs these risks and costs, but anarchists should not
get too comfortable making such rationalizations.
There has been much talk of applying the SHAC model in other contexts,
but few such efforts have produced anything comparable to the SHAC
campaign. This bears some reflection. It’s worth pointing out that some
of the hype about the far-reaching applicability of the SHAC model has
come straight from HLS, and so should be taken with a grain of salt. HLS
is not interested in promoting effective new direct action methods, but
rather in creating enough of a scare that other members of the ruling
class will come to their assistance; it follows that even if they claim
that SHAC tactics can be used effectively against any target, this is
not necessarily the case. The same goes for sensationalist analyses by
organizations such as Stratfor, whose primary goal seems to be
terrorizing the public into feeling a need for their “intelligence.”
It may be that, because the SHAC campaign maintained momentum while
other forms of organizing dropped off, it has exerted a disproportionate
influence upon the imaginations of current anarchists, to such an extent
that many now tend to imitate the SHAC model in their organizing even
when it is not strategically effective. Failures can be more instructive
than successes; unfortunately, as they are more readily forgotten, they
are often repeated over and over. For this reason, any consideration of
the SHAC model should begin with the example of Root Force.
Root Force arose out of Earth First! circles a couple years ago with the
intention of promoting a SHAC-style campaign targeting the
infrastructure of global capitalism—an exponentially more ambitious goal
than shutting down HLS. The organizers researched the corporations
involved in pivotal infrastructural projects such as transcontinental
highways and power plants. A website was set up to publicize this
information and any actions that occurred; road shows toured the country
to spread the word. It seemed that all the pieces were in place, and yet
nothing happened.
Early in 2008, Root Force released a statement entitled “A Revised
Strategy” in which they acknowledged that their efforts had failed to
produce an effective direct action campaign and described the
difficulties of attempting to inspire action against infrastructural
projects located so far away as to seem entirely abstract.
Root Force misunderstood how direct action campaigns take off. Action
and inaction are both contagious. If some people are invested enough in
a cause to risk their freedom for it, others may do the same; but as no
one wishes to go out on a limb in isolation, a sound strategy alone is
not sufficient to inspire actions.[7] Properly publicized, one serious
direct action in the Root Force campaign would have been worth a hundred
road shows.
The Root Force campaign had other flaws as well. If the goal was simply
to give demonstrators something to do, the strategy was as good as any
other; but if they hoped to block the construction of the highways and
power plants most essential to the expansion of the capitalist market,
they would have had to mobilize a lot more force than the SHAC campaign.
If the targets they picked really were of critical importance to the
powers that be, it follows that the government would have mobilized
every resource to defend them. Overextension is the number one error of
small-scale resistance movements: rather than setting attainable goals
and building slowly on modest successes, organizers set themselves up
for defeat by attempting to skip directly to the final showdown with
global capitalism. We can fight and win ambitious battles, but to do so
we have to assess our capabilities realistically.
Other SHAC-influenced approaches have been characterized by an emphasis
on home demonstrations. For example, over the past few years, protesters
against the IMF and World Bank have experimented with targeting
executives and corporate sponsors. In 2006, while Paul Wolfowitz was
president of the World Bank, there were a series of demonstrations at
his girlfriend’s home; eventually she moved. This does not seem to have
impacted the IMF to the same extent as the worldwide upheavals
associated with the anti-globalization movement. Sarcasm aside, there’s
little to be gained from harassing people like Wolfowitz: unlike the
tertiary parties SHAC targeted, they are not simply going to take their
business elsewhere.
Similarly, at the 2004 Republican National Convention, some organizers
called for demonstrators to focus on harassing the delegates. The risk
of this approach is that it can frame the conflict as a private grudge
match between activists and authorities, rather than a social movement
that is able to attract mass participation. Like Wolfowitz, Republican
delegates are hardly going to retire because a few protesters shout at
them—and even if some did, they would instantly be replaced. One
proposal for the 2008 RNC protests involved activists targeting
corporations that would be providing services to the convention.
Targeting corporations providing services might have helped build
momentum in the lead-up to the RNC, but it’s unlikely that it could have
succeeded in depriving an organization as powerful as the Republican
Party of necessary resources. The same probably goes for proposals to
target weapons contractors serving the US government—it might give
demonstrators something exciting to do, but no one should underestimate
what it would take to make a corporation like Boeing break off relations
with the US military.
Some see the Rising Tide and Rainforest Action Network campaigns against
Bank of America as relatives of the SHAC campaign; these did use
secondary targeting, although they were directly descended from
environmental campaigns that preceded it. At the end of 2008, in a
context of broader economic turmoil, Bank of America declared that they
were pulling their financing from companies predominantly involved in
mountain-top removal. However insincere this declaration may be, it at
least indicates that the campaign forced BOA to take notice.
Environmentalists in Indiana have had less success attempting to stop
the construction of highway I-69 via a combination of home and office
demonstrations and forest occupation tactics. In “A Revised Strategy,”
Root Force cited I-69 as a pivotal infrastructural project; it will be
interesting to see how the state responds if the struggle against I-69
ever becomes formidable.
All this is not to say that the SHAC model cannot be applied
effectively, but simply to emphasize that activists must be intentional
and strategic about where and how they attempt to do so. There are
probably some situations in which the model could accomplish even more
than it has for SHAC; without a doubt, there are other contexts in which
it can actually be counterproductive.
To repeat, the SHAC campaign in the US has only involved a few hundred
participants at any given time; a few thousand could possibly take on a
bigger target. Even forcing the government to bail out a corporation,
whether or not the target was successfully bankrupted, could still
constitute an important victory. As of today, it remains to be seen
where effective applications of the SHAC model will be found beyond the
campaign that spawned it.
[1] Unlike HSUS and PETA, the ALF is not technically an organization,
but rather a banner taken up by autonomous cells which do not
necessarily have any connection to each other.
[2] According to reports, the main organizers of this group have since
joined HSUS. This is an example of the subtle conflicts and power
dynamics that play out in the animal rights movement: SHAC organizers
complain that HSUS absorbs committed activists by giving them paying
jobs and forbidding them to collaborate with more militant activists.
[3] Unlike many social movements, the animal rights movement is
supported by wealthy donors, and we can assume that some of them have
contributed to SHAC.
[4] This advertisement is all the more ironic in view of the role masked
thugs in nations like Colombia continue to play in defending the
interests of corporations who trade on Wall Street.
[5] Secondary targeting means going after a person or entity who does
business with the primary target of a campaign. Tertiary targeting means
going after a person or entity who is connected to a secondary target.
[6] If there have not been corresponding conflicts regarding race and
class, this may simply indicate that SHAC organizing has been
predominantly white and middle class. Some have charged that the animal
rights movement in the US attracts many from this demographic who are
more comfortable protesting the oppression and exploitation of animals
than addressing the power imbalances in their relationships with other
human beings.
[7] Compare this to the critique of calls for “autonomous actions” at
mass mobilizations in “Demonstrating Resistance,” available in the
recent features section of the reading library on this site.