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Title: After the Crest Author: CrimethInc. Date: 2013 Language: en Topics: social movements; tactics; occupy oakland; rebellion; strike; struggle Source: Retrieved on September 13th, 2013 from [[http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2013/09/09/after-the-crest-the-life-cycle-of-movements/]]
At the high point, it seems like it will go on forever. You feel
invincible, unstoppable. Then the crash comes: court cases,
disintegration, depression.
Once you go through this several times, the rhythm becomes familiar. It
becomes possible to recognize these upheavals as the heartbeat of
something greater than any single movement.
Over the past six years, cities around the world have seen peaks of
struggle:
,
,
,
,
,
,
. A decade ago, anarchists would converge from around the world to
participate in a single
Now many have participated in months-long upheavals in their own cities,
and more surely loom ahead.
But what do we do after the crest? If a single upheaval wonât bring down
capitalism, we have to ask what matters about these high pointsâwhat we
hope to get out of them, how they figure in our long-term vision, and
how to make the most of the waning period that follows them. This is
especially pressing today, when we can be sure that there are more
upheavals on the way.
To this end, we have organized a dialogue with anarchists in some of the
cities that have seen these climaxes of conflict, including Oakland,
Barcelona, and Montréal. This is the first in a series of reflections
drawn from those discussions.
Practically all of the participants in these discussions independently
reported that it was really hard for them to formulate their thoughts:
âI donât know why, but whenever I sit down to work on it, I get
depressed.â This suggests a broader problem. Many anarchists depend on a
triumphalist narrative, in which we have to go from victory to victory
to have anything to talk about. But movements, too, have natural life
cycles. They inevitably peak and die down. If our strategies are
premised on endless growth, we are setting ourselves up for inevitable
failure. That goes double for the narratives that determine our morale.
â A mysterious social phenomenon that aspires to growth yet, when
observed, always appears to be in decline.
When social change is gathering momentum, it is protean and thus
invisible; only when it stabilizes as a fixed quantity is it possible to
affix a label to it, and from that moment on it can only decompose. This
explains why movements burst like comets into the public consciousness
at the high point of their innovation, followed by a long tail of
diminishing returns. A sharper eye can see the social ferment behind
these explosions, perennial and boundless, alternately drawing in new
participants and emitting new waves of activity, as if in successive
breaths.
In Occupy Oakland, a three-week occupation gave way to a six-month
decline. This bears repeating: movements spend most of their time in
decline. That makes it all the more important to consider how to make
the most of the waning phase.
As all movements inevitably reach limits, it is pointless to bewail
their passingâas if they would go on growing indefinitely if only the
participants were strategic enough. If we presume the goal of any tactic
is always to maintain the momentum of a particular movement, we will
never be able to do more than react quixotically against the inexorable
passing of time. Rather than struggling to stave off dissolution, we
should act with an eye to the future.
This could mean consolidating the connections that have developed during
the movement, or being sure to go out with a
to inspire future movements, or revealing the internal contradictions
that the movement never solved. Perhaps, once a movement has reached its
limits, the most important thing to do in the waning phase is to point
to what a future movement would have to do to transcend those limits.
We had
for almost 24 hours, and we were starting to imagine that we could
somehow hold onto it. I was about to go out for supplies to fortify the
place when something caught my eye. There in the dust of the abandoned
garage was a hood ornament from a car that hadnât been manufactured in
40 years. I reached down to pick it up, then hesitated: I could always
look at it later. On impulse, I took it anyway. A half hour later, a
SWAT squad surrounded the building for blocks in every direction. We
never recovered any of the things we built or brought there. Over a
hundred of us met, danced, and slept in that building, outside the
bounds of anything weâd previously been able to imagine in our little
town, and that little hood ornament is all I have to show it happened.
When I visited my friends in the Bay Area the following week, they were
in the same state of elation I had been when I left the building: âWe
walk around and people see us and call out OCC-U-PY! Things are just
going to grow and keep on growing!â
During a crescendo of social struggle, it can be difficult to maintain
perspective; some things seem central yet prove transitory, while other
things fall by the wayside that afterwards turn out to have been
pivotal. Often, we miss opportunities to foster long-term connections,
taking each other for granted in the urgency of responding to immediate
events. Afterwards, when the moment has passed, we donât know how to
find each otherâor we have no reason to, having burned our bridges in
high-stress situations. What is really important, the tactical success
of a particular action, or the strength of the relationships that come
out of it?
Likewise, it is rarely easy to tell where you are in the trajectory of
events. At the beginning, when the window of possibility is wide open,
it is unclear how far things can go; often, anarchists wait to get
involved until others have already determined the character of the
movement. Later, at the high point, it can seem that the participants
are at the threshold of tremendous new potentialâwhen in fact that
window of possibility has already begun to close. This confusion makes
it difficult to know when it is the right time to shift gears to a new
strategy.
We were outside at a café in downtown Oakland a couple months later. I
was asking what my friends thought the prospects were for the future.
âThings will pick up again when spring arrives,â they assured me.
At first I believed them. Wasnât everyone saying the same thing all
around the country? Then it hit me: we were sitting there in the
sunshine, wearing t-shirts, in the city that had seen the most intense
action of the whole Occupy movement. If there wasnât another occupation
there already, it wasnât coming back.
split, split on your own terms.
Movements usually begin with an explosion of uncertainty and potential.
So long as the limits are unclear, a wide range of participants have
cause to get involved, while the authorities must hold back, unsure of
the consequences of repression. How do we keep this window of
possibility open as long as possible without sidestepping real
disagreements? (Think of Occupy Wall Street when it first got off the
ground and all manner of radical and
tendencies mingled within it.) Is it better to postpone clashes over
ideological issuesâsuch as nonviolence versus diversity of tacticsâor to
precipitate them? (Think of the controversial black bloc in Occupy
Oakland on
.)
One way to approach this challenge is to try to clarify the issues at
stake without drawing fixed lines of political identity in the process.
As soon as a tactical or ideological disagreement is understood a
conflict between distinct social bodies, the horizon begins to close.
The moment of potential depends on the fluidity of the movement, the
circulation of ideas outside their usual domains, the emergence of new
social configurations, and the openness of individual participants to
personal transformation. The entrenchment of fixed camps undermines all
of these.
This problem is further complicated by the fact that the top priority of
the authorities is always to divide movementsâoften along the same lines
that the participants themselves wish to divide. It may be best to try
not to precipitate any permanent breaks until the horizon of possibility
has closed, then make sure that the lines are drawn on your own terms,
not the terms of the authorities or their
.
What is still possible once the horizon has been circumscribed? In a
dying movement, one can still
, setting new precedents for the future so subsequent struggles will be
able to imagine going further. This is a good reason not to avoid
ideological clashes indefinitely; in order to legitimize the tactics
that will be needed in the future, one often has to begin by acting
outside the prevailing consensus.
For example, at the conclusion of November 2, 2011, Occupy Oakland
participants controversially attempted to
. This provoked a great deal of backlash, but it set a precedent for a
series of building occupations that enabled Occupy to begin to challenge
the sanctity of private property during its long waning phaseâgiving
Occupy a much more radical legacy than it would otherwise have had. One
yearâs breakthroughs are the next yearâs limitations.[1]
During the burgeoning stage of a movement, participants often become
fixated on certain tactics. There is a tendency to try to repeat oneâs
most recent successes; in the long run, this can only produce
conservatism and diminishing returns. Diminishing returns are still
returns, of course, and a tactic that is no longer effective in its
original context may offer a great deal of potential in another
settingâwitness the occupation of
in June 2013, when no one in the US could imagine occupying anything
ever again. But tactics and rhetoric eventually become used up. Once no
one expects anything new from them, the same slogans and strategies that
generated so much momentum become obstacles.
As soon as Occupy is in the news, anyone who had an occupation in mind
had better hurry to carry it out before the window of opportunity has
closed and nobody wants to occupy anything at all. In a comic example of
this tendency to fixate on certain tactics, after Occupy Oakland was
evicted, Occupy Wall Street mailed a large number of tents across the
country as a gesture of support. These tents merely took up storage
space over the following months as the struggle in Oakland reached its
conclusion on other terrain.
Sometimes, after a new strategy that is attuned to the present context
has created new momentum, there is a tendency to revert to previous
approaches that have long ceased working. When people with little prior
experience converge in a movement, they sometimes demand guidance from
those who have a longer history of involvement; more often, it is the
veterans themselves who demand to provide this guidance. Unfortunately,
longtime activists frequently bring in old tactics and strategies, using
the new opportunity to resume the defeated projects of the past.
For example, fourteen years ago, worldwide summit-hopping offered a way
to exert transnational leverage against capitalist globalization,
offering a model to replace the local and national labor organizing that
had been outflanked by the international mobility of corporations. Yet
when labor activists got involved, they criticized summit-hoppers for
running around the world rather than organizing locally the
old-fashioned way. Likewise, Occupy got off the ground because it
offered a new model for an
increasingly precarious population
to stand up for itself without stable economic positions from which to
mobilize. But again, old-fashioned labor activists saw this new movement
only as a potential pool of bodies to support union struggles, and
channeled its momentum into easily coopted dead ends.
In the wake of every movement, we should study what its successes and
failures show about our current context, while recognizing that by the
time we can make use of those lessons the situation will have changed
once more. Beware of rising expectations.
When a movement is at its high point, it becomes possible to act on a
scale previously unimaginable. This can be debilitating afterwards, when
the range of possibility contracts again and the participants are no
longer inspired by the tactics they engaged in before the crest. One way
to preserve momentum past the end of a movement is to go on setting
attainable intermediate goals and affirming even the humblest efforts
toward them.
The trajectory of
in Oregon at the turn of the last century offers a dramatic example of
this kind of inflation. At the beginning, the goals were small and
concrete: protect a specific tree or a
. After the
World Trade Organization protests
in Seattle, the goals of green anarchists in the region hypertrophied
until they reached a tactical impasse. When your immediate objective is
to âtake down industrial civilization,â just about anything you can do
is going to feel pointless.
Indeed, during a declining phase, it may be important to resist the
tendency to escalate. When the
ran aground, Root Force set out to apply the same strategy against a
much bigger targetâscaling up from a single animal testing corporation
to the major infrastructural projects underlying transnational
capitalism. A SHAC-style campaign targeting a smaller corporation might
have succeeded, empowering a new generation to go on applying the
strategy, but Root Force never even got off the ground.
The declining phase of a movement can be a dangerous time. Often,
popular support has died down and the forces of repression have regained
their footing, but the participants still have high hopes and feel a
sense of urgency. Sometimes itâs best to shift focus before something
really debilitating occurs.
Yet quitting while youâre ahead is complicated. If the connections that
have been made are premised on collective action, it can be difficult to
retain these without staying in the streets together.
Months after Occupy Oakland was definitively over, police brutally
attacked an anarchist march against Columbus Day, making several arrests
and pressing felony charges. It is an open question whether this showed
that anarchists had overextended themselves, but after a payback action
the following night in Oakland, street activity in the Bay Area died
down for almost a year. On the other hand, after the UK student movement
died down, an explosion of
in August 2011 suggested that many of the underclass participants felt
abandoned by the withdrawal of their former activist allies from street
action. It is possible that, had the movement continued in some form,
the riots might have turned out differentlyâas a point of departure for
another wave of collective struggle, rather than the desperate act of a
marginalized population rising ruinously against society itself.
After the crest, when the euphoria is over, many participants will
experience depression. Since the events that regularly brought them
together have ceased, they are isolated and more vulnerable. Others may
veer into addiction: substance use can be a way to maintain intimacy
with each other and with danger itself when there is no more fire in the
streets. The simple pleasures with which people celebrated their
victories can expand to fill the space left by the receding tide of
events, becoming self-destructive. This is another reason to establish
new venues to maintain camaraderie and connection when the window of
possibility is closing.
All of these problems are often intensified by the explosion of discord
that usually follows a movementâs demise. Once it is clear that a
movement is definitively over, all the conflicts that the participants
have been putting off come to the fore, for there is no longer any
incentive to keep them under the rug. Suppressed resentments and
ideological differences surface, along with serious allegations about
abuse of power and violations of consent. Learning from these conflicts
is an essential part of the process that prepares the way for future
movements: for example, contemporary anarchism is descended in part from
the feminist backlash that followed the New Left movements of the 1960s.
But participants rarely think to save energy for this phase, and it can
feel like thankless work, since the âactionâ is ostensibly over.
It was a few nights before the eviction of the Occupy Philly encampment,
and we were holding a General Assembly to decide what to do. Tensions
were running high between the residents of the camp, who were primarily
homeless, and those who participated chiefly in meetings and working
groups. That night, a homeless man interrupted the GA to accuse several
of those in leadership positions of being in league with the police,
being racist, and planning to sell out the homeless. The facilitator
tried to ignore the disruption, but the angry man drowned him out and
eventually riled up a few more people who began shouting too. In this
moment of chaos and heightened emotion, we had a unique opportunity. We
could have shifted our focus from the threat that the government wanted
us to react to, instead using that GA to finally address the tensions in
our own group in hopes of building a force that could survive into the
next phase of struggle. Instead, the facilitator tried to restore order
by directing us to âbreak into small groups and discuss what ârespectâ
means.â My heart sank. Our shared energy was explosive; we needed to
channel it, not suppress it.
That was the last time I saw many of the comrades Iâd befriended over
the preceding months. The eviction wasnât the greatest threat we faced
after all.
Government repression usually does not hit in full force until after a
movement has died down. It is most convenient for the state to attack
people when their support networks have collapsed and their attention is
elsewhere.
struck years after the high point of Earth Liberation Front momentum,
when many of the participants had moved on and the communities that had
supported them had disintegrated. Similarly, the authorities waited
until May 2012 to strike back at Occupy with a series of
.
The chief goal of repression is to open the fault lines within the
targeted social body, isolating it and forcing it into a reactive
position. Ideally, we should respond to repression in ways that
establish new connections and position us for new offensives.
How do we transition into other forms of connection when the exceptional
circumstances that drew us together are over? The networks that coalesce
effortlessly during the high point of momentum rarely survive. While new
events were unfolding, there was an obvious reward for setting
differences aside and interrupting routines to converge. Afterwards, the
large groups that formed slowly
, while smaller groups often vanish altogether. The reshuffling of
allegiances that takes place during this period is vital, but itâs
equally vital not to lose each other in the shuffle.
During the crest of a movement, participants often take for granted that
it will leave them at a higher plateau when it is over. But this is
hardly guaranteed. This may be the most important question facing us as
we approach the next wave of struggles: how do we gain and hold ground?
Political parties can measure their effectiveness according to how many
new recruits they retain, but anarchists must conceive of success
differently.
In the end, it isnât just organizations with contact lists that will
remain after the crest, but above all new questions, new practices, new
points of reference for how people can stand up for themselves. Passing
these memories along to the next generation is one of the most important
things we can do.
Three Years since the Greek Insurrection
, our interview with comrades in Athens about the months following the
Occupy Oakland Is Dead; Long Live the Oakland Commune
Squattersâ Movement, by Lynn Owens
This is the second part in our âAfter the Crestâ series, studying what
we can learn from the waning phase of social movements. In this
installment, participants in Occupy Oakland trace its trajectory from
origins to conclusion, exploring why it reached certain limits and what
it will take for future movements to surpass them.
In setting ourselves the sobering task of narrating the decline of
Occupy Oakland, we are at least spared any argument about when the high
point took place. There might be disagreement about whether the âgeneral
strikeâ of
deserved that title, but no one would dispute that it was the high-water
mark of the local movement and a turning point in the Occupy sequence
unfolding across the country.
At that moment, describing Occupy Oakland as the
was not just an exaggeration. For a short time, we really were a
collective force with the ambition and capacity to transform the whole
city and radicalize the national movement. The experience of that day
has stayed with many of us, a brief and chaotic glimpse of
insurrectionary horizons that closed as quickly as they opened.
Remembering this as we go about our daily lives under capitalism has
been enormously painful; for many of us in the Bay Area, the last year
and a half has been a process of grieving the loss of that moment. This
grief was present in all the successive stages of that political
sequence. Although the movement continued for months, bringing out
thousands of people for explosive days of action, none of the later
momentsâDecember 12,
, or
âeven remotely compare to November 2.
Before we can analyze the Oakland Communeâs decline, we have to
understand its rise and the various projects in the Bay that helped to
foster it. The following narrative is not meant as a total account of
all of the elements that combined to form the Oakland Commune, but
rather the ones we experienced firsthand.
During the spring of 2011, with a backdrop including the
, the European
âmovement of the squares,â
and its faint echo in the
, comrades in the Bay Area began a slow process of reconstituting
themselves as a force in the streets. This followed an extended period
of decomposition and aimlessness. Many of us expected that the wave of
unrest sweeping the globe would reach the US eventually, and we wanted
to be prepared. That summer, the Bay Area witnessed a series of small
but fierce and creative demonstrations. From the native encampment
protecting Glen Cove against suburban development in Vallejo to the
in San Francisco after police gunned down Kenneth Harding when he
avoided a transit fare check, the summer provided several opportunities
for radicals from a range of communities to work together.
During June and July, a mix of anti-state communists and insurrectionary
anarchists organized a series of anti-austerity actions dubbed
that got people into the streets to experiment with new tactics and
forms of social intervention. These were intended to map out the local
terrain of struggle and the various antagonistic social constellations
that might participate in future rebellions. Through these small and
sometimes frustrating excursions, new march routes and ways to
understand the geography of downtown Oakland emerged. For instance, the
third and final Anticut action
âorganized in solidarity with a hunger strike in California
prisonsâmarched from the future home of Occupy Oakland in Frank Ogawa
Plaza down Broadway past the police headquarters, courthouse, and jail,
holding a noise demo there before circling back towards the plaza to
disperse. This small demonstration marked the first time this loop was
tried. Months later, during the high-tension moments of Occupy Oakland,
that march route became intimately familiar to thousands of people,
sometimes repeated multiple times per day.
The rhythm of small and medium-sized demonstrations such as the
Anonymous actions against BART police and the one-day
occupation of UC Berkeleyâs Tolman Hall
continued throughout the summer and early fall. But it wasnât until
momentum began to build nationally after the establishment of the
Zucotti Park camp on Wall StreetâSeptember 17, 2011âthat the full
potential of the relationships built over the summer could blossom.
Oakland joined the national movement late, on October 10, immediately
establishing a sprawling camp in the plaza in front of City Hallârenamed
Oscar Grant Plaza, after the young Black man murdered by BART police in
2009. This became a liberated zone, off-limits to police and politicians
and organized according to principles of self-organization, free access
to food and supplies, open participation in all aspects of camp life,
and autonomous action.
In hindsight, it is striking how quickly Occupy Oakland emerged,
matured, and reached its peak. Only two weeks separate
from the first police raid in the early hours of October 25. After the
Commune repeatedly resisted attempts by the city administration to
assert control over the campâstaging public burnings of warning letters
during general assemblies in the amphitheater on the steps of city
hallâMayor Jean Quan authorized the militarized police operation that
left the camp in ruins and over 100 in jail.
Later that same day, thousands of enraged people
, charging police barricades around the plaza and braving countless
barrages of tear gas and projectiles until the early hours of the
morning. Partly because of the near murder of Iraq War veteran Scott
Olsen by a police projectile that night, and the dramatic footage of the
entire downtown area covered in gas, the next day the police withdrew in
a storm of controversy. Exultant crowds reoccupied the plaza, holding an
assembly of 2000 peopleâthe largest of the whole sequenceâand agreed to
go on the offensive with the November 2 strike. The fact that it seemed
possible to organize a general strike in a single week indicates the
degree to which normal calendar time warped and stretched in those first
three weeks. During the Oakland Communeâs incredibly rapid yet brief
ascent, there seemed to be no limit on what could happen in a week, a
day, an hour.
It all came to a head on
. Looking back, the scope of that day remains impressive. In less than
24 hours, the strike unleashed all the tactics explored during the
entire Occupy Oakland sequence. Flying pickets, work actions, marches,
blockades, occupations, and moments of riotous destruction brought as
many as 50,000 people to downtown Oakland, many of whom were
participating in disruptive acts for what must have been the first time.
People gathered in the early morning under a giant banner, stretched
across the central intersection in downtown, reading âDeath to
Capitalism.â From there, the crowds quickly fanned out across the center
of the city, shutting down businesses that had refused to close for the
day. The camp at the plaza became a crowded anti-capitalist carnival
offering music and speeches from three different stages. By early
afternoon, as tens of thousands filled the streets, an anti-capitalist
march led by a large black bloc smashed its way through downtown,
leaving broken windows and graffiti on banks and corporations in its
wake. Within a few hours, tens of thousands of people marched on the
port of Oakland, shutting down all operations at its various terminals.
Finally, as night fell, hundreds of people
the aptly-named Travelerâs Aid building a few blocks from the plaza;
long empty, it had formerly housed a nonprofit serving the homeless.
Within an hour, however, riot police attacked and evicted the new
occupation, provoking a night of rioting during which people wrecked
most of the businesses and city offices around the plaza, including a
police substation.
We were in the middle of something without recent precedent in the US.
And yet the day was just a day. There was no continuation, no sense of
what might come next. The following morning, after three weeks of great
weather, the first rains of the season fell and the camp lay quiet,
foreshadowing the dispirited mood of the months to come. The backlash
from the previous dayâs anti-capitalist march and the more
indiscriminate rioting later in the night was intense, as various
liberal elements took the opportunity to demonize anarchists and the
black bloc, calling for vigilante patrols by pacifists and initiating a
reactionary backlash that caused many anarchists and radicals to steer
clear of the camp for a few days. The mood shifted from elation to
demoralization very quickly, especially given the failure of the
occupation of the Travelerâs Aid building, which might have opened up
new horizons for the Oakland Commune. It was difficult to recognize this
at the time, but we had already encountered the fundamental limits of
this sequence of struggle. The slow decline had begun.
Arguably, the decline had been set in motion in the days immediately
before the strike. Up until the raid on October 25, the power of the
Oakland Commune lay in the camp itself: in collective activities that
linked each day in the liberated plaza with the next, building momentum
through consistent interaction around questions of survival rather than
activism. When over 600 riot police fired tear gas and flash-bang
grenades as they broke through the barricades protecting Oscar Grant
Plaza in the dark morning hours of October 25, they were not only
attempting to evict the camp, but to break apart the continuity of the
tenuous community that we had formed.
This first eviction backfired on them spectacularly. The crowds came
back even bigger and called for the November 2 strikeâa timely and
effective decision. But it also marked the first moment when the energy
of the Commune shifted from the daily process of holding liberated space
to a strategy built around discrete âdays of action.â The day in
question was only one week away, and the buildup to it ran parallel with
the reconstitution of the camp. But with the historic decision to
strike, there was a shift away from the reproduction and expansion of
the original oppositional zone. Something was lost in this transition.
The consistent process of eating, sleeping, and organizing with many
others in a liberated zone at the heart of a struggling North American
city had proved to be a challenge for which few were prepared. At times,
the Commune was a veritable infernoâa place of fistfights, constant
emergencies, injury, illness, miscommunication, and stress. At other
moments, it offered a kind of freedom and beauty unlike anything else.
There were times when each person seemed full of limitless creativity,
compassion, and dedication, matched by hatred of capitalism and the
state. We could see the experience changing people day by day, hour by
hour, and we could feel it changing us. The camp was a place of joy,
laughter, and care, almost psychedelic in the confusion it provided to
the senses. But mostly, it was a place that teetered on the edge of
breakdown, a place in which none of the usual buffers and mediations
that mask the daily violence of contemporary America were present. All
the misogyny, homophobia, racism, and other poisonous dynamics that form
the foundations of capitalist society rose to the surface in this
liberated zone, challenging the Communeâs ability to sustain itself. We
were ill-prepared for the problems the camp raised, though people made
heroic attempts to respond to each new emergency.
For this reason, many comrades welcomed the first police raid in hopes
that direct conflict with the state would breathe new life into a
struggle slowly dying of internal causes. After the raid, people could
focus their attention outward in offensive actions like the general
strike, away from the overwhelming difficulties of the camp.
The decision to strike was not a mistake. On the contrary, it was one of
the better decisions collectively made during the entire sequence. But
it inaugurated a half-year period defined increasingly by days of action
called for by the general assembly rather than the rhythms of shared
experience. This process accelerated after
the second eviction of the camp
on November 14 and reached its terminal point with the late January call
for another
âa strike that never materialized. May Day 2012 ended up being an
exciting day of action, but it paled in comparison to the November 2
strike, which had been organized in only a week. The more that the
Oakland Commune lost its footing, momentum, and sense of direction, the
more it relied on arbitrarily chosen days of action that were
increasingly few and far between.
In the shift away from the camp towards spectacular offensives, the
actions of November 2 opened up three horizons of struggle, each of
which hit a wall over the following months. In many regards, the limits
of these approaches were already apparent during the strike.
First, there were the tens of thousands who laid siege to the port. Most
would agree that the high point of the dayâthe action that had the most
impact on capitalism and the local power structureâwas this blockade of
the port of Oakland. However, the success of that action empowered one
tendency within the movement to push the struggle away from reclaiming
space and disrupting the flows of capital toward a kind of trade union
superactivism that later proved to be a dead end.
Secondly, there was the attempt, later in the evening, to occupy the
Travelerâs Aid building. But when riot police besieged the building, the
participants failed to put up any meaningful defense. It was one thing
to occupy public parks and plazasâbut another thing to breach the sacred
barriers of private property. Comrades had been discussing that
trajectory from the beginning, but the failure of the Travelerâs Aid
attempt indicated that it might remain an unsurpassable horizon.
Finally, there was street fighting and the black bloc. This represented
the dream of continuous escalation, in which a proactive offensive of
black-clad rioters would usher in a new phase of increasingly widespread
militant rebellion, culminating in a full-on uprising. Certainly,
November 2 saw some of the most intense street conflicts up to that
point, epitomized by the appearance of a large black bloc during the
afternoon anti-capitalist march. Yet that night, when riot police were
finally ordered to reassert control of downtown Oakland and evict the
newly occupied building, this increased street militancy meant little.
Police scattered the participants like a bowling ball plowing into a
wedge of pins.
Few people were organized into affinity groups capable of acting
intelligently and decisively in the face of the highly trained and
physically intimidating Oakland police. Inexperienced rioters had the
tendency to attack weakly and prematurely, then scatter when the police
counter-attacked. In addition, the presence of vigilante pacifist
members of Occupyâwhose violent assertion of nonviolence underscored the
paradox of their positionâand amateur journalists too busy photographing
the riot to help their ostensible comrades both produced confusion and
dissension. As is often the case in the US, comrades were able to carry
out attacks on property with relative ease, adopting an effective
hit-and-run strategy. But when it came to standing ground or mounting an
offensive against the police, the street fighters were rarely effective.
After the camp was cleared during the second police raid of the plaza on
November 14, many comrades continued along each of these three
trajectories, moving ever farther from the camp that had brought them
together in the first place.
The labor solidarity wing of the movement, born during the November 2
port blockade, increasingly viewed Occupy as a vehicle for supporting
unions and intervening in existing workersâ disputes. On December 12,
this faction led a day of action to shut down ports across the West
Coast (as well as in other scattered locations such as a Walmart
distribution center in Colorado). This had been called for in response
to the wave of repression and camp evictions across the country in late
November and early December, as well as in solidarity with the struggle
of longshoremen in Longview, WA against the efforts of the multinational
corporation EGT to break their union, the ILWU. While not entirely
successful, the day was still impressive, demonstrating the continuing
power of Occupy. As 2012 began, this labor solidarity wing of the
movement was busy spearheading a regional mobilization to disrupt the
first scab ship scheduled to dock at the EGT facilities in Longview.
Many comrades from the Bay planned to converge on Longview in what
looked to be an important showdown.
Elsewhere, an alliance of insurrectionaries and comrades from a wide
range of working groups that had sustained the camp were organizing
another offensive. Regrouping from the failure of the Travelerâs Aid
occupation, they had called for a massive day of action on January 28,
2012 to occupy a large undisclosed building. This was to become a new
hub for the Oakland Commune.
Finally, there was the assortment of radicals and rebels who
continuously struggled to hold down Oscar Grant Plaza itself. Some of
them had slept on benches in the plaza long before Occupy; some were
young locals politicized over the previous months; others hailed from a
range of eccentric Bay Area groupings including a contingent of
juggalos. The plaza was still contested turf with regular general
assemblies, events, and a 24-hour âvigilâ that held space, served food,
and provided a social venue. The park and empty lot a few blocks away in
the gentrifying Uptown district at 19^(th) and Telegraph had also become
a second front, following a brief occupation there on November 19 that
ripped down the surrounding fences and established a camp before being
quickly evicted.
This was the political climate in Oakland on New Yearâs Eve, as
left from the plaza for a noise demo. The crowd followed the now
familiar loop from the plaza to the police headquarters, courthouse, and
jail, where people unleashed a torrent of fireworks before returning to
the plaza for a raucous dance party. With hundreds attending, it was
powerful demonstration that even without the camp the Commune could
still call the plaza home. It was also a celebration of the struggles to
come and the next major wave of the Occupy movement, which many believed
to be just around the corner. In those early celebratory hours of 2012,
it was nearly impossible to grasp how quickly all of these possible
trajectories would hit walls. But in January, the limits that first
became apparent on November 2 became debilitating, ushering in the
terminal phase of the movement.
Oscar Grant Plaza was first to go. Running scuffles between the ragtag
rebels of the plaza and platoons of cops looking to scare them off had
increased throughout December, becoming a daily occurrence by the final
week of the year. Dozens were arrested. In contrast to previous mass
arrest situations, the cops and DA were clearly looking to make examples
of the arrestees, who were slapped with large bails, felony charges, and
a new favorite tactic of repression: stay-away orders that threatened
people with additional jail time if they returned to downtown Oakland.
While not as spectacular as police indiscriminately tear-gassing and
spraying crowds with projectiles, the most brutal and effective
repression of the whole Occupy Oakland sequence arguably occurred during
the turf war over the plaza at the turn of the year. Because so many
comrades were focused on organizing for the upcoming days of action,
those facing the cops and courts in the plaza were isolated, without the
support they needed.
Inspired by the success of the New Yearâs Eve noise demo and hoping to
respond to the escalating repression, the Tactical Action Committeeâa
militant group composed primarily of young Black men from Oakland who
had been busy defending the plaza and organizing other actionsâcalled
for the first FTP (Fuck the Police) march one week later, on January 7.
On January 4, after a general assembly in the plaza ended and the
majority of people went home, a militarized raid involving dozens of
riot police successfully evicted the vigil. This was the third and final
raid of Oscar Grant Plaza. A member of TAC was among those arrested in
the operation. The rebel presence in the plaza had been successfully
removed, and the upcoming FTP march took on increasing significance.
Nearly three hundred gathered at the corner of the Plaza at 14^(th) and
Broadway on the evening of January 7. Many were masked up and ready for
a fight, feeling that this was the moment to present a coordinated
militant response to the successive evictions of the Commune. Led by a
massive âFuck the Policeâ banner, the march took off once again down
Broadway on the loop past police headquarters and the jail. Clashes
erupted near the headquarters as a police cruiser was attacked, bottles
were thrown, a small fire was lit in the street, and lines of riot
police repeatedly charged the crowd. Yet once again, the displays of
militancy were just that, displaysâineffective when it came to defending
comrades. Fighters were able to get in a few hits on police, but quickly
retreated and fled out of downtown in the face of the OPD offensive.
Arguing erupted among comrades, as it became clear that the eagerness
with which many went on the attack was not matched by any kind of
organized defense or coordinated crowd movement. As comrades scattered,
leaving the plaza abandoned once again, another wave of arrests ensued
with police units picking off isolated street fighters who had been
identified by undercovers in the crowd. As with the wave of arrests
around the plaza over the previous weeks, the people arrested at this
first FTP march bore some of the heaviest penalties of the whole
sequence, with some comrades eventually doing significant jail time.
The first FTP march failed to reverse the rapid decline of the Commune
or reassert the movementâs presence downtown. On the contrary, it
accelerated this decline, signaling to the state that it was now clearly
gaining the advantage. This was not the fault of TAC, who continued to
hold weekly FTP marches over the following months that were usually less
confrontational. Rather, it showed the limits of the uncoordinated and
tactically ineffective displays of street militancy mustered by the
black blocs of that period. At the time, this series of painful defeats
failed to register to many comrades as a serious blow to the movement,
even though the authorities had successfully swept the plaza clean and
neutralized the attempt to mount a response. Many people were
distracted, with their sights set on the upcoming days of action. In
retrospect, the new year was clearly off to a bad start.
Planning continued for the convergence in Longview and the January 28
day of action. General assemblies decreased in size and regularity but
continued to meet, increasingly retreating to the park at 19^(th) and
Telegraph since an increasing number of comrades were prohibited from
the Plaza by stay-away orders. The source of the Communeâs power, the
defiant public occupation of space, was quickly drying up, though the
upcoming offensives gave many comrades the sense that another wave of
momentum was imminent.
This delusion was shaken when the bureaucrats at the top of the ILWU
outmaneuvered the planned blockade of the scab ship in Longview, and all
plans for the convergence imploded. Occupy caravans had been organized
from Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere, while the federal
government announced it would defend the scab ship with a Coast Guard
cutter. Comrades from across the West Coast were just waiting for word
from those working directly with the Longview Longshoremen to initiate a
confrontational showdown. But in their determination to reorient Occupy
towards labor activism, the tendency that had coalesced during the
November 2 port blockade constructed a framework that was completely
disconnected from the streets and plazas from which they had emerged.
With every step from the November 2 strike through the December West
Coast port blockade and towards Longview, these actions ceased to be
participatory disruptions in the international flows of capital as a
projection of the occupationâs power beyond the plaza. Instead, they
became solidarity actions, organized only with supporting the union in
mind. There was naĂŻve talk about the actions sparking a wildcat strike
in the ports, or prying the union away from the bureaucrats who were
eager to diffuse the conflict and cooperate with EGT. But none of this
came close to materializing.
In the end, the labor solidarity tendency within Occupy Oakland and the
handful of radical Longshoremen allies were no match for the political
machinations of those at the top of the ILWU, who coerced the rank and
file of Longview to accept a compromise with EGT that kept them on the
job while stripping them of many benefits and their job security. This
was enough to ease the tension and avert the showdown. On January 27, as
the last-minute plans for the following dayâs attempt to occupy a
building were finalized, a confusing statement emerged from the caravan
organizers, announcing that the Longview workers had accepted a contract
and that this wasâin some unspecified wayâa victory. This was how the
port campaign ended: not with a bang, but a whimper.
The next morning, the final offensive of January kicked into action.
Though in many regards it was the most significant day since the general
strike, the planned January 28 (J28) building occupation was
fundamentally an arbitrarily chosen day of action with all the limits
thereof. However, unlike the port actions, this was a massive attempt to
return to what had made the Oakland Commune so powerful in the first
place: liberating space from capital and the state, transforming it into
a collective occupation where people could take care of each other and
organize further actions. Even though many remember that spectacular day
as one of the most important in their experience as part of the Oakland
Commune, in relation to its stated goal, it was a disaster.
In response to criticism of the clandestinely organized occupation of
the Travelerâs Aid building on November 2, J28 was organized in a
radically open structure. Regular âMove-In Assembliesâ of over 100 met
publicly in the plaza to plan the occupation, while giving a smaller
closed group the mandate to pick a building in relative secrecy. This
assembly spent countless days organizing infrastructure for the new
occupation, setting up guidelines for accountability within the space
and planning a multi-day festival of music, speakers, and films. As the
day of action unfolded, this ambitious plan was blasted apart in the
first spectacular clashes outside the target buildingâthe massive Kaiser
Center Auditoriumâin what became known as
. It was probably because people believed so strongly in the dream that
a new liberated space could emerge from the Kaiser Center and
resuscitate the Commune that they fought so hard and with such a
collective spirit that day. But OPD had no qualms about transforming
downtown into a warzone to insure that private property remained
off-limits.
A backup plan later in the day also failed to seize a building. As night
fell, OPD called in additional police forces from across the Bay Area.
After their first attempt to kettle a march of nearly a thousand people
at 19^(th) and Telegraph was outmaneuveredâthe crowd dramatically
escaped by tearing down the fences the city had recently rebuiltâthe
police finally succeeded in surrounding over 400 comrades outside the
downtown YMCA. The arrestees spent the following days in filthy
overcrowded cells at Santa Rita Jail.
Amazingly, those who remained on the streets remained undaunted. They
broke into City Hall, burning the American flag and vandalizing the
inside of the building in revenge for the police repression. Even after
riot police with shotguns chased them off, the night was still not over.
An FTP march was quickly organized. In keeping with tradition,
participants took the familiar loop through downtown and unleashed
rocks, bottles, and other objects at the police station and jail as they
passed. The Commune was not going down without a fight.
Yet that was the end. The limits had emerged one by one over the course
of January, and there was no new occupation or wave of mobilizations on
the way. On January 29, as comrades scrambled to support the hundreds in
jail while thousands across the country organized solidarity
demonstrations with Oakland, over 300 gathered at the plaza in what
turned out to be the last large general assembly. They voted
enthusiastically to endorse calls emerging from New York and elsewhere
for a May 1 global general strikeâa strike that never materialized. Many
still hoped that Occupy would reemerge with a spring offensive. But
given the bitter defeat in the turf war over the plaza, the implosion of
the port blockade campaign, and the failure to secure a new home for the
Commune, this seemed unlikely. January was the end. Occupyâs window of
radical possibilities would soon be closed in Oakland and everywhere
else.
Over the following months, people carried out many amazing and inspiring
radical projects. Occupy Oakland organized a series of large
neighborhood BBQs across the city. The
set an impressive standard for how to take care of arrestees and
imprisoned comrades. The
SF Commune temporarily held a building at 888 Turk
.
Insurgent feminist and queer comrades
who had come together over the previous months continued a campaign of
actions and interventions while writing and distributing propaganda and
texts. Clashes and attacks temporarily erupted across the Bay around May
Day, while a struggle over an occupied farm emerged in neighboring
Albany. Foreclosure defense campaigns successfully held off a series of
evictions. For a week, people occupied an Oakland public school that was
being closed down.
Yet the chance to regain momentum had passed in January. All of these
efforts were still riding on evaporating momentum from the previous
fall. In their increasing detachment from each other, they represented
the long process of dispersal and decomposition that began with the
strike on November 2.
At its core, Occupy was about occupying. In Oakland and elsewhere, it
was about producing a form of life defined by mutual aid,
self-organization, and autonomous action. It was about defending spaces
free from police, politicians, and bosses, and the necessarily violent
conflict between those zones and the surrounding capitalist world on
which the camps nonetheless depended. Oakland took this about as far as
it could go within the framework of Occupy, establishing a zone that fed
and sheltered hundreds of people each dayâsometimes thousandsâin brazen
defiance of the city officials fifty yards away in City Hall and the
cops leering from the periphery. For all the hype about social media,
livestreaming, and other information technologies enabling this new wave
of revolt, the grounding of the struggle in the face-to-face
relationships that combined to form the occupation is clearly what gave
Occupy its unique potential and created the material foundation for all
the political possibilities of the movement. The authorities understood
this. Thatâs why they cleared the camps in Oakland and everywhere else,
using as much force as necessary to prevent reoccupation.
Once the camp was cleared, the Oakland Commune became a husk deprived of
its central tactic and, arguably, its reason for being. This was the
reason why the vigil clung mournfully to the plaza despite repeated
battering by OPD. It was the reason why the decision was made to claim a
building for the movement on January 28. It was why the planning for an
autonomous occupation provided the initial impetus for the convergence
of feminist and queer comrades in what would later become Occupy
Patriarchy. Without something to take the place of what had been lost
with the camp, there was little chance that we would regain the
expansive prospects of the fall.
The strength of
was its ability to carve out material zones of political antagonism that
were not organized around petitioning the authorities for concessions
through symbolic demonstration but directly providing for our daily
needs through the repurposing and reclamation of urban space. This was
one of the most appealing aspects of the camp: it offered the
opportunity to explore ways of relating and surviving together that did
not rely on the usual mechanismsâmoney, the state, police, predefined
social hierarchies and categoriesâthough the banishment of those things
was always partial and provisional at best. This enabled the
participants to bypass some of the more tedious ways in which activists
develop political projects, equipping people to organize around their
own survival, in their own cities, on the basis of their personal
experience of oppression and need, rather than according to essentially
moral objections to this or that injustice. In the context of this
contagious form of revolt spreading through the communal liberation of
space, the movementâs rejection of the need to issue any specific
demands to authorities made perfect sense. Occupyâs power came from the
proliferation and reproduction of these oppositional zones, not from its
political sway.
But if the camp was the source of our strength, it was also the source
of the limits we reached, and not only because without it there was no
real future for Occupy. At root, the camp was inadequate to the project
of finding ways to live together beyond the specious forms of community
that capitalism provides. In fact, the Oakland camp was already in a
state of degeneration by the time it was cleared, and probably would
have broken down on its own eventually.
The camp was no more violent or miserable then the city of Oakland is on
any given day. Yet the level of everyday misery, alienation, and abuse
that makes up the mundane reality of capitalist society is truly
staggering, especially when concentrated in a plot of grass in the
middle of an impoverished city. When we liberate urban space in 21^(st)
century America, we have no choice but to confront the devastation
produced by centuries of capitalism, conquest, and domination.
Inside the reclaimed space opened up by the Commune, rampant
interpersonal conflicts and forms of structural violence could not be
contained or managed in the ways that capitalism normally does, through
the violence of the police, the institutions of the state, or the
ready-to-hand hierarchies provided by money and commodities. We had to
confront these problems collectively and directly. But to do so
adequately would have required the expropriation of resources and space
far beyond what was within the grasp of the nascent movement. It also
would have required the audacious dedication of participants to
transcend their atomized lives and constructed identities under
capitalism, going past the point of no return. The failure to overcome
these fundamental obstacles enabled power relationships built on
patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity to reassert their
dominance within the movement while undermining and repressing the vital
new relationships that had emerged through the process of struggle.
These were the underlying limits that led the Commune away from the
reclamation of space that had provided the basis for its initial rapid
ascent, and ushered in its six month decline, passing the point of no
return as the horizons of struggle that led away from the camp hit dead
ends in January 2012.
This is the double bind we found ourselves in: the camp was both
inadequate and essential. A potential solution to this bind is contained
in the concept of the Commune, by which we mean the projected
translation of the principles of the camp onto a new, more expansive
footing. Occupy Oakland became the
once it took the camp as the model for a project (barely realized) of
reclamation, autonomy, and the disruption of capital on a much wider
basis: neighborhood assemblies reclaiming abandoned buildings for their
needs; social centers that could serve as hubs for organizing offensives
and sustain all kinds of self-organization and care; occupations of
schools and workplaces. These were the horizons that the Oakland Commune
illuminated, in the positive sense, despite its limits. We believe it is
likely that future struggles in the US will follow this trajectory in
some way, using Occupyâs attempted offensives and space reclamations as
the foundation upon which something much larger, more beautiful and more
ferocious can begin to take shape.
But the questions still remain: what would it mean to actually take care
of each other and to collectively sustain and nurture an unstoppable
insurrectionary struggle? How can we dismantle and negate the oppressive
power relationships and toxic interpersonal dynamics we carry with us
into liberated spaces? How can we make room for the myriad of revolts
within the revolt that are necessary to upend all forms of domination?
The effectiveness of any future antagonistic projects in the U.S. will
be determined by our ability to answer these questions and thus
transcend the limits that were so debilitating within Oscar Grant Plaza,
forcing the Commune away from the very source of its power.
Another wave of struggle and unrest will undoubtedly explode in our
streets and plazas sooner or later. Our task in the meantime is to
cultivate fierce and creative forms of cooperating, caring for each
other, and fighting together that can help us smash through the
fundamental limits of contemporary revolt when the time is right. If we
can make substantial strides beyond these obstacles, police attacks and
jail sentences will be no match for the uncontrollable momentum of our
collective force.
Some Oakland Antagonists, August 2013
This is the third part in our âAfter the Crestâ series, studying how we
can make the most of the waning phase of upheavals. This installment
analyzes the rhythms of struggle in Barcelona over the past several
years, discussing the complex relationship between anarchists and larger
social movements as popular struggles escalated and then subsided. It
concludes with practical input on how anarchists can take advantage of a
period of ebbing momentum.
For best results, read this in combination with our earlier features on
Barcelona:
âFire Extinguishers and Fire Starters,â
describing the plaza occupation movement of spring 2011, and
âThe Rose of Fire Has Returned,â
, focusing on the general strike of March 2012. Together, the three
pieces trace the trajectory of an upheaval from its inspiring but
ideologically murky inception through the high point of confrontation
and into the aftermath.
Anarchists in Barcelona played an important and visible role in the
social upheavals of September 2010 to May 2012, which in their turn were
an influential contribution to the
taking place in those same years. By the summer of 2012, in the Spanish
state and elsewhere, these upheavals largely appeared to have subsided.
Anarchists in Barcelona have faced a number of important questions and
difficulties as a growing social disintegration contrasts with the
earlier times of social coalescence. Will the gains won in those moments
of rebellion be lost now that the prevailing social mood is one of
resignation?
Whether it takes months or years, such gains are never lost, only
surrendered. Social rebels can hold on to the strength they have won if
they allow it to transform rather than expecting it to accumulate. It
would be self-defeating to predict, from this vantage point in 2013,
whether the anarchist struggle in Barcelona will lose ground or go back
on the offensive, because that future rests largely on our own
decisions.
2007: A conflict arises within the squattersâ movement when one sector
seeks legalization within a reformist discourse of housing rights. As a
result, anarchists redouble their efforts to elaborate a critique of
capitalist housing. They also question the practice of squatting for the
sake of squatting.
End of 2007:
-led bus driversâ strike, with critical use of sabotage and anarchist
solidarity, wins many of its demands.
Spring 2008: A campaign begins for the freedom of longtime anarchist
prisoner Amadeu Casellas. A year later, a similar campaign begins for
Joaquin Garces.
September-October 2008: US stock market crashes.
October 2008: In an action two years in preparation, populist but
nonetheless practical anticapitalists in Catalunya use half a million
euros robbed from banks through fraudulent loans to print and distribute
hundreds of thousands of copies of a newspaper (published in three
different volumes over the next two years) that criticizes capitalism
and suggests alternatives. About three years later the group begins a
complex of consumer and producer eco-cooperatives.
December 2008: Greece is gripped by an insurrection, with solidarity
actions and important consequences in anarchist practice in Barcelona.
Spring 2009: A huge student movement against Plan Bologna austerity
measures is killed off by pacifist leadership. Once occupied
universities are evicted, the radical part of the student movement turns
to squatting empty buildings and self-organizing a âfree university.â
2009: Barcelona witnesses a growth of coordinated solidarity actions and
attacks in solidarity with anarchist prisoners and anarchists in Chile
and Greece, as well as daylight attacks against targets that can be
easily associated with housing and job precarity. The support campaign
wins the freedom of Joaquin Garces.
Spring 2010: The government in Madrid announces the first of many rounds
of austerity measures. In preparation, major and minor labor unions,
along with anarchist and other groups, begin preparing resistance across
the Spanish state. In Barcelona, the first neighborhood assemblies are
also formed to organize the upcoming general strike.
September 29, 2010: General strike, with major participation and heavy
rioting in Barcelona.
January 27, 2011: Minority unions, primarily the anarcho-syndicalist CNT
and CGT, launch their own general strike, without the major unions.
Participation is significant though far from total, and complemented by
several significant sabotage actions.
May 1, 2011: In a collaborative effort between anarcho-syndicalist
organizations, socialist Catalan independence organizations, and
insurrectionary or informal anarchists, a combative May Day protest
successfully wreaks havoc in a rich neighborhood for over an hour.
May 16, 2011: A day after major protests across the Spanish state, a
group of 100 activists begin an occupation of Plaça Catalunya in the
center of Barcelona. Within a few days, the occupation grows to 100,000
and beyond. The 15M movement is born. Subsequently, new neighborhood
assemblies appear across the city, and a series of massive protests and
blockades are organized.
Fall 2011: The movement against the privatization of healthcare in
Catalunya peaks with numerous blockades and occupations of hospitals and
clinics.
January 2012: Public transportation workers, largely organized by the
CGT, betray their promises and sell out a week-long strike before it
begins, making a deal that meets none of their initial demands and
wasting weeks of organizing, much of it carried out by allies and
transportation-users. Fortunately, that same week, a student strike
takes over the streets. Students disobey their leaders, riot, and attack
the media.
March 29, 2012: A general strike paralyzes the country. In Barcelona and
other cities, protesters engage in the biggest riots yet.
May 1, 2012: The police militarize the streets, expecting possible
rioting in the anti-capitalist May Day protest. Most anarchists,
however, prioritize countering media and government discourses around
the earlier general strike. Thousands of flyers are distributed.
October 31, 2012: The minority unions hold another general strike. This
time, the CGT organizes peace police to prevent riots. Most anarchists
do not solidarize with the strike, and it passes practically without
notice.
November 14, 2012: The major unions together with the smaller unions
carry out the next general strike. The neighborhood assemblies, largely
weakened, and the informal anarchists, doubtful or uninspired, do not
play a major role in preparing. In Barcelona, the protests during the
strike are massive, but the police control the streets and brutalize
people from one end of the city to the other. The general mood after the
strike is of disappointment or powerlessness.
The social upheavals in Barcelona were not caused by material
conditions. The structures and traditions that became most important in
the space of the revolt were already in place before the economic crash.
And the greatest spikes in popular participation in the revolt were
direct responses either to movement initiatives that resonated with
peopleâs perception of their problems, or to a perceived attack on their
living conditions. Specifically, spikes occurred when the government
announced an austerity measureânot when austerity measures took effect
or the economic crisis as a whole began to be feltâor else when an
initiative such as a strike or an occupation attracted many people and
went off successfully. In other words, peopleâs perception of their
living conditions and the possibilities for resistance has proved more
real than any objective measurement of those conditions on a material
level, whether evaluated in wages, unemployment, or otherwise.
The key to gaining strength in times of social disintegration can be
found in this approach. We are not mere subjects of social forces. On
the contrary, we actively and confrontationally position ourselves to
contradict the narrative that justifies or hides those forces. When the
narrative depicted social peace and prosperity, we occupied a network of
cracks in and margins of that prosperity, demonstrating that we were not
content with the wages society was willing to pay us and that we knew we
were not the only ones in refusal. When the narrative depicted change
and reform, we positioned ourselves at the juncture of the mass of
bodies beginning to appear in the streets and an imaginary horizon that
contradicted the democratic ideology that mobilized and homogenized
those bodies. When the narrative depicts disappointment and
powerlessness, we approach the collapse of social movements with joy,
because it unmasks the false promises of populists and reveals what is
truly lacking for us to regain our lives.
Just as our actions had meaning in times of social peaceâjust as
revolutions were not inevitable in times of austerityâour actions, our
projects, and the positions we choose in relation to events can
sometimes tip the scales to determine whether a social disintegration
erases everything that was won in a period of revolt, or whether the
lull that always follows the storm will soon be interrupted by another
wave of revolt.
A simple comparison of events in the United States and events in
Catalunya suggests that a highly disintegrated society is likely to
sustain a single brief flare of resistance before normality resumes,
whereas a more coalesced society can sustain multiple intense waves of
revolt in relatively close succession before exhausting its hope and
rage. Some of us hold that the activity of social strugglesâunderstood
broadlyâis the best way to reverse the social disintegration caused by
capitalism. The farmers and artisans who blindly resist modernization;
the insurrectionaries who connect with popular rage; the activists who
overcome themselves by spreading an ethic of mutual aid rather than the
specialization of charity; the old people who insist on telling the
stories of their defeat; and the artists who evade their own
recuperationâall of them help society[2] to coalesce in the face of the
disintegrating force of capitalism.
Just as the more densely knit society can sustain the reverberations of
revolt for longer, the places within that society where comrades seek
and generate conflict as part of an ongoing effort will not fall back
into silence as quickly. In Catalunya as in the United States, a
successful projectuality has allowed certain towns and cities to
maintain more intense struggles where all around them the social peace
has already returned. Revolt moves through the social body, but its
specific functions may be performed by any of that bodyâs cells. We are
not external to the body, as a surgeon, a sociologist, or a vanguard,
but neither are we its prisoners.
We imagine that it will be the concussiveness of repeated outbursts of
revolt, and not the geometrical growth of a social movement, that will
destroy the current structures of governance, the way the intense
vibrations of an earthquake or avalanche liquefy the hardest materials.
If this is correct, one of the vital tasks of rebels is to unlearn the
mechanical motions of the Left and the fatalistic expectations that a
mechanical worldview inculcates, and to relearn rhythmic cycles of
struggle.
A couple years before the new social movements broke out, many
anarchists had already begun to change how they interacted and how they
positioned themselves in relation to the rest of society. This enabled
them to be much more effective in the social coalescence that occurred
from the general strike of September 2010 through the 15M movement to
May Day 2012; to play a role in extending and radicalizing that
coalescence; and to hold on to a good deal of potential as it began to
fade away.
In the previous century, the anarchist space in Barcelonaâthe terrain of
struggle which anarchists inhabit and help to createâhas changed in
shape and density numerous times. I would identify three different forms
this space can take: a unified space, which is held together by an
organizational center of gravity, with communication occurring primarily
within a singular organizational set of boundaries that can presume to
represent an anarchist movement; a segmented space, which is divided
between multiple centers that generally do not overlap or communicate;
and a fragmented space, which is comprised of numerous distinct groups
or currents that, despite differing and often conflicting, intersect and
overlap to an untraceable degree, so communication and connection are
networked intensively. In their long history in Barcelona, anarchists
have always been most effective when their space was fragmented.
An increase in their strength, or the potential loss of that strength,
has generally led them to unify their space of struggle. Unified spaces
have generally precipitated major defeats, as the weaknesses of a single
line of struggle can affect the entire movement.[3] The contrasting
interpretations of those defeats have repeatedly led to the appearance
of a segmented anarchist space. In the last thirty years, the anarchist
space in Barcelona has gone from unified, to segmented, to fragmented.
The last change occurred primarily between 2008 and 2012.[4] It was
visible in the exodus of anarchists from the squatting bubble, in the
bus driversâ strike of 2008, in increasing attempts at citywide or
regional coordination through 2009 and 2010, and afterwards in
participation in neighborhood assemblies, plaza occupations, citywide
coordinating groups, campaigns against foreclosures, campaigns against
immigrant detention centers and raids, and labor assemblies for the
organization of strikes. Clearly, the increase of popular resistance and
the erosion of social peace helped to strengthen the anarchist space and
created many more opportunities for methods of non-unified coordination
to be put into practice, but the fragmentation of the anarchist
spaceâwhich also made it impossible for any one part to dominate the
others, and compelled anarchists to seek shared spacesâwas already a
fact.
Throughout these moments of growth, a major strategic tension has played
out between those who sought to unify the anarchist movement and those
who fought to preserve its fragmentation.
In part because of the change in how most anarchists are positioning
themselves, neither recuperation nor repression has been able to
suppress the upheaval.
Initially, most anarchists positioned themselves in such a way as to not
have any hope of nourishing or influencing the revolt. They either
accepted it uncritically, happy that other people were finally taking to
the streets no matter what their motives or expectations were, or else
they dismissed it as reformist.
This dismissal reveals an important miscalculation. By correctly
characterizing the new neighborhood assemblies or the occupation of
Plaça Catalunya as âsocial democratic,â radical anarchists obscured what
proved to be the more important characteristic: that these spaces were
spontaneous and not institutional (at least, not yet). Characterizing
people or spaces as reformist is erroneous, even if factually accurate,
because reformism is an institutional force that captures people and
spaces, rather than an essence that emanates from them. Anarchists who
were justifiably concerned with avoiding reformist strategies walled
themselves off from new relationships, not realizing that spaces of
encounter always have revolutionary potential. The people who fill those
spaces initially enact reformist strategies because that is what they
know. The structures that institutionalize those spaces are imposed
afterwards by internal or external recuperators.
The mistrust of reformism was overcome the same way in Plaça Catalunya
and in the neighborhood assemblies. First, a couple of the more
adventurous, eccentric, or leftist anarchists began to participate. Some
of these felt comfortable in the new spaces, others were wary, but all
of them were able to share space with reformists, either out of
tolerance or thick skin. Then they spread the word within their circles,
and soon it became popular for most anarchists to attend these
heterogeneous spaces, though how they participated varied greatly.
This pattern defied a number of my expectations, though it makes sense
in retrospect. Those with the sharpest social intuition, who arrived
early in the spaces that later proved to be of great importance, were
hippies, leftists, and, only very rarely, combative anarchists. Later,
the insurrectionary anarchists and the intensely activist anarchists[5]
flooded in. The activists tended to build up the structures of the
assemblies and occupations without trying to distill their revolutionary
potential or criticize their social democratic anxieties; on the whole,
they avoided practices that would generate conflict with their newfound
allies. Of the insurrectionaries, some denounced the hypocrisy of a
spontaneous movement that in one moment called for revolution and in
another discussed getting rid of bad politicians or rescuing the welfare
state. Not realizing that incoherence is a constant feature of life
under capitalism, for anarchists as well as vaguely upset citizens, they
turned their back on the new movements. The others stayed, seeking a
balance between conflict and connection. Their conflictive approach
drove them to seek fault lines and drive them open, while also trying to
be part of a constantly expanding web of relationships.
Simultaneously, the new practice of engagement dovetailed with anarchist
support for the general strikes. The strike was already an accepted
tradition of struggle, and anarchists in particular have a long history
of organizing them, so it was less a leap of faith for anarchists to
work with unionists, influencing the outcome and character of the
strikes. Their distrust of unions (which many CNT members share) helped
rather than hindered their ability to radicalize the strikes, as long as
they were willing to engage in some way.
As anarchist engagement in non-anarchist spaces brought clear results,
many anarchists adopted a practice of participating in spaces of
encounter and fostering relationships with people in institutionalized
dissident organizations, while never joining those organizations. This
positioning enabled anarchists to keep leftist institutions in check,
holding them up to the radical values they purport to espouse and
criticizing their betrayals more directly. It is possible that this is
one reason why the social struggles in Barcelona have not been
recuperated.
Another reason is that there has been no unified strategy of
recuperation. The labor unions once occupied the critical position,
enabling them to recuperate the most threatening of struggles.[6] But
new activist formations like
have shown the most potential to capture popular outrage and redirect it
towards superficial democratic complaints that focus on politicians and
civic forms of participation. It has been in the organizational
interests of unions to pull the focus of complaint back to the terrain
of economics and laborâthough this seems to have infected that terrain
with the practice of assemblies and self-organization that was being
co-opted by democracy activists. Thanks to the jockeying between
competing would-be recuperators, the hollow discourse of the democrats
has been contaminated with questions of economy, while the vertical
terrain of the unions has been undermined by a renewed tradition of
self-organization.
Recuperation is still a danger, and some would say the anarcho-reformist
CGT (the third largest labor union in the country, a split from the
anarchist CNT) is the most capable of synthesizing these two strategies
of recuperation. In the meantime, both the terrain of labor and the
terrain of democracy are constantly destabilized by radicals who bring
an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist vision. However, as labor and
democracy are recuperative lenses placed on top of the fundamentally
radical fields of sustenance and organization, it is probable that even
if nobody employs a successful strategy of recuperation, as long as
radicals do not succeed in shattering the recuperative lenses already in
place, ongoing social conflicts will not be able to develop a truly
revolutionary character. Nonetheless, a conflict that cannot be
recuperated will continue to destabilize the State.
One of three things could happen that would make anarchists incapable of
preventing ongoing attempts at recuperation. If the media, aided by
anarchist arrogance, succeed in isolating anarchists from broader
movements, then the unions, activist organizations, and left-wing
political parties will be able to bind social struggle within a
discourse of democracy, rights, and reform. If anarchists give up their
conflictive attitudes out of fear of some greater evil (such as fascism,
which will be discussed presently), they will not be able to expose and
criticize recuperators in the movement. Finally, if they unify and
become a movement with which the unions or activist formations could
negotiate, they will end up legitimizing the power of would-be leaders,
and they will lose the ability to interact in a fragmentive way with
other sectors of the movement. A fragmentive interaction is crucial in
that it allows anarchists to criticize and create relationships
simultaneously, thus generating a multiplicity of forms of both
criticism and relation, undermining homogeneity and discipline in
non-anarchist sectors of the social movements and potentially extending
fragmentation well beyond the anarchist space.
Repression has not failed for lack of effort by the police. Police
harassed neighborhood assemblies occupying plazas or marching in the
streets, they brutally evicted the Plaça Catalunya encampment, they
arrested twenty-two people for attempting to blockade Parliament, they
arrested large numbers of people after every riot including over a
hundred after the March 29 general strike, they have imprisoned people,
they have inflicted permanent injuries upon several people, and they
have introduced new laws and surveillance measures that constitute a
serious crackdown on popular struggle.
But at every step, spreading resistance has discouraged the authorities
from continuing these campaigns of repression. When they arrested a list
of mostly anarchists for spitting on or assaulting politicians during
the June 2011 blockade of Parliament, spontaneous solidarity protests
numbering in the thousands took to the streets, covered the walls with
graffiti, and rained abuse upon the police. Neighborhood assemblies took
up collections for their legal costs. Even though the pacifist
leadership of the 15M movement, together with the media, succeeded in
demonizing the violence of blocking streets and spitting on politicians,
when specific people were arrested for that violenceâpeople whom their
neighbors and other protesters had gotten to know in the neighborhood
assemblies or elsewhereâthe entire movement claimed them as their own.
When the repression failed to isolate the bad protesters and only
brought more people out into the streets, the government quickly scaled
down the attention they were giving to the case and quietly left it on
the back burner.
A similar thing happened with their new public snitching website,
inaugurated to encourage good citizens to identify rioters from photos
taken during the March 29 general strike. On the whole, anarchists
responded with a clandestine mentality, assuming the reality of
repression and staying low or preparing to go into hiding. Fortunately,
socialist independentistes, parents, and neighborhood assemblies
protested the snitching website publicly, flooding the streets in
indignation or refusing to accept the criminalization of rioters. After
a few weeks, the government took the website down.
If the social upheaval in Barcelona was neither recuperated nor
repressed, why has it faded away? Although some important errors and
weaknesses did contribute to its decline, the decline was inevitable and
even healthy.
Both leftism and the rationalist worldview it stems from train us to
view the world in an unrealistic way. This generates false expectations
and false criteria with which to evaluate our struggles. The crux of the
matter is that we are not the abstract value both Capital and the Left
see in us: we are living beings with our own autonomous rhythms that
constantly fly in the face of managerial strategies and social
mechanics.
People took to the streets with a social democratic idea of revolution.
Encouraged by pacifist assurances about âpeople power,â by media
misrepresentations of the Arab Spring or the
, by Hollywood fantasies like the revised ending of V for Vendetta which
subsequently found its way into specifically cyber-activist portrayals
of revolution like the one projected in Zeitgeist 3, they thought they
could bring power to its knees simply by taking to the streets.
When this proved false, they experienced the great emotional force of
disappointment. This disappointment was delayed by the initial rush of
overcoming alienation in the blossoming neighborhood assemblies, or by
the recurrences of the dream of people power fostered in the massive
protests organized every few months out of the 15M phenomenon. But when
the assemblies shrank and the protests did not bring the results they
were looking for, there was nothing left to hold back the
disappointment.
When people disappear, it turns out that their eyes go first, and their
ears linger a while longer. We can react to their disappearance as a
completed fact, concluding that the others were never really in the
struggle to begin with and giving up on the conversation that had begun
with them. Or we can recognize that the disappeared are really only
half-disappeared, that they are still there, blind and invisible,
listening. When we continue the conversation, banging on bank windows,
taping open the gates of the metro, setting off fireworks at noise
demos, the half-disappeared can hear this, and they understand it to be
an invitation back into the streets. That invitation is first of all a
demand that they rethink their vision of the struggle. Those who do come
back, come back stronger.
And even those who never go away do not stay in the streets
consistently. They are for ever coming and going, deciding whether to
let their projects die or try once more to resuscitate them. We have to
recognize that even those who dedicate their entire lives to the
struggle must also have their seasons.
Earlier, I described the struggle in a time of social coalescence as a
constantly expanding web of relationships. That expansion gave people a
new pulse. It contradicted the unflagging march of alienation. But when
it seemed to subside, people lost the collective heartbeat they had only
just found.
They did not lose the pulse because it had disappeared, but because the
expansion that gives it meaning is not quantitative. It is no mistake
that the science of Capital teaches us to recognize only one form of
expansion. Because we are blinded to the horizons towards which the
social body expands, we lose hold of it and fall back to the flat
reality of alienation. Sadly, the same magic that makes the social body
stronger than the chains of the State also shakes off those who have
been trained to think geometrically, as much as they would like to
remain in the presence of that new and growing collectivity.
smooth ride.
The intensification of relationships that goes hand in hand with the
coalescence of society is never a quantitative growth. It occurs in
multiple dimensions at once. The tendrils of the web surge forward,
capturing new space, linking new bodies, and then contract, deepening
the intensity of those links. Just as the visible growth of a tree needs
the attendant growth of the roots, a social struggle needs moments of
subterranean expansion.
In Mediterranean Barcelona, the heat of high summer makes it easy to
recognize that the dog days are not moments for going on the attack or
sitting through meetings, but for relaxing, exalting the body, and
reflecting on recent struggles and the upcoming autumn. But the leftist
obligation to produce motion often deprives us of winter. All people in
struggle need a time to confront their despair, lick their wounds, and
to fall back on the comforting bonds of friendship. Not realizing this
animal necessity, many anarchists exhaust themselves by trying to
maintain a constant rhythm, or they mistake a slowdown for a loss of
strength, and they allow their gains to be washed away. But winter can
be an important time to hunker down, to carry forward the projects that
sustain us (and realize which those are), to test the strength of new
relationships, and to sound the depth of oneâs community of struggle.
These rhythms are not uniform, just as one winter is never the same as
the next. Some winters, people light fires in the open and stand by them
until spring, as the Greek comrades did in
, which we tried to imitate, in a way, in 2010. Other winters, everyone
retreats to their private hearths, as at the end of 2012. But was that a
defeat?
After the general strike of September 2010, anarchists discovered that
there was tinder everywhere. They stayed busy in their burrows and
prepared another great fire before the winter was out, and the general
strike of January 2011 lit the way to May Day and the plaza occupation
movement. With all the activity, that summer was short, and people were
beginning to tire by autumn. The fall of 2011 was not the âotoño
calienteâ (hot autumn) everyone was expecting, informed by the logic of
geometric growth. In their shrinking neighborhood assemblies, some new
spaces of encounter, and the persisting spaces of coordination with the
unions, people just managed to hold on through winter, riding the last
of the wave that had begun in May. They kept their dreams and memories
intense through lively debate, so that when the two major unions were
finally forced to call a new general strike by an even greater round of
austerity measures, people threw themselves into organizing it, and what
was created exceeded everyoneâs expectations. Through force of will,
people stayed on their feet despite heavy blows of repression. Striding
forward, they made it through May Day, 2012, long enough to take the
streets without being intimidated by the immense police presence, and to
counteract the media narrative about the March 29 riots with an
onslaught of flyers, posters, and graffiti.
After that, the social body fell asleep. The summer was long and
pacific. In the fall people rallied to prepare a new round of strikes or
to stop the growth of fascism, but could not see clearly how to carry
those struggles forward. The next general strikes sputtered forward
ineffectively, and in winter people holed up in small group projects
they had created with friends, whether or not those projects had proven
effective in the last months. These included specifically anarchist
assemblies that organized debate and propaganda, neighborhood social
centers, distros, free stores, or mutual aid networks intended to
encourage anarchist responses to problems of job precarity or home
foreclosures.
Narrated as the movements of a great social body, this rhythm of rise
and fall makes perfect sense. After such gigantic efforts, the
collectivity needs to sleep, and that sleep is not a form of weakness
but a necessary activity in which gains can be solidified. Yet many
people experienced the exhaustion of the social body as defeat, as loss.
In accepting this as reality, they will learn all the wrong lessons,
rather than identifying the activities most crucial to the moment.
To a slight extent, because conversations about a rhythmic rather than
geometric resistance had already begun to take place, comrades in
Barcelona were able to shift their focus, despite widespread feelings of
defeat. Anarchists gave priority to groups of a newly expanded affinity,
in which they worked together with comrades whom they had gotten to know
in the recent upheavals. They debated, they recovered their energy, and
they strengthened friendships new and old. If the recognition that a
slowdown was inevitable and healthy had been generalized, they might
have carried out these activities with a sense of triumph and
innovation. Instead, most comrades had the attitude that they had to be
content with an inferior kind of activity, because it was the only
activity that seemed possible in the moment. Thus, they correctly took
advantage of the lull to debate the hot moments of struggle of the
previous months, but they failed to recognize the particular value of
that moment of social slumber.
The moment also demanded that anarchists strengthen their relationships
of difference, seeking out the sincere neighbors, coworkers, and other
people they had gotten to know in heterogeneous spaces such as the
neighborhood assemblies. These were the people with whom they were
losing contact due to social disintegration. It is of the utmost
importance to resist that social disintegration, to seek out recent
acquaintances and continue solidifying relationships. Obviously, it is
much easier to struggle together with comrades of affinity in moments of
social peace or defeatism, especially because so many other people
ceasing struggling in these moments. But we must not confine our method
of struggle to the âhotâ moments of upheaval and coalescence. We must
also learn a long, abiding struggle, and this requires reaching out to
those we met and learning what practical things we can share when they
no longer continue to participate in assemblies, debates, and protests.
As noted earlier, it is also important to keep making noise, whether via
protests or attacks, to invite the disappeared to return to the streets.
In Barcelona, this has happened with continued student strikes and
actions enabling people to ride the metro for free. However, if these
actions are not undertaken as a conscious invitation, but as an attempt
to maintain lost momentum, they will only contribute to the exhaustion
and disillusionment of those in the struggle.
Finally, moments of defeatism and disintegration need to be seized as
opportunities for propaganda. After a strong wave of struggle, people
often fall away because they are exhausted and because they are
disappointed at how little they have accomplished, how much farther they
have to go. This is the time when anarchists have to unmask the false
promises of the recuperators and reformists. This is the time to show
that all the politicians, all the government, have to be thrown out,
that the police and the media are our enemy, that revolution is not an
easy affair. This is the time to celebrate our collective bravery in the
streets, to remember what we were fighting for, and to point to
promising directions that were revealed in the recent struggle, whether
those include a practice of assemblies and self-organization, a defense
of houses from eviction, the expropriation of food and clothes from
capitalists, the occupation of land, or the burning of banks. It is rare
that the death of a struggle does not leave behind some bones that can
be fashioned into new tools. We should not leave them lying in the dust.
On the whole, anarchists in Barcelona did not seize on the temporary
collapse of the struggle to point out the false promises of the
recuperators. In fact, the opposite happened. When one of the
neighborhood assemblies that functioned on largely anarchic lines
started to flag and disappearâas had all the neighborhood assemblies at
that pointâsome Trotskyists who had been saving their energy for that
moment, and who had not committed their time and energy to keeping the
assembly alive in the prior months, swooped in like vultures to blame
the weakness of the assembly on the informal structure that anarchists
had won in debates more than a year earlier.
Healing ourselves, strengthening friendships, building consistent and
practical relationships with people we met in the upheaval, inviting the
disappeared back into the streets, showing that the disappointment only
reflects the false promises of reformists and recuperators: these are
the essential tasks in the moments of exhaustion, defeatism, and
disintegration that nearly always follow social upheavals. These are the
tasks that can set off a new wave of struggle after the inevitable
lowâthat prepare the way for subsequent peaks and plateaus to reach ever
higher. At the very least, they equip us to stay strong and be prepared
for whatever comes next.
We also need a culture of lively debate to hone our social intuition so
that we can keep up with changes in context. Struggle has its cycles,
but these cycles are not repetitions, and not every metamorphosis in the
social struggle is cyclical.
The context in Barcelona has shifted several times over the last couple
years. At some points, anarchists cleaved to this shift like naturals,
whereas they missed other shifts and had to spend months catching upâor
simply lost in a terrain that suddenly behaved differently.
The struggle shifted after the first general strike. It shifted again
with the plaza occupation movement. It shifted yet again when the plaza
occupation dissolved and the neighborhood assemblies blossomed. That
shift was recognized and to a certain extent even precipitated by
anarchists, whereas the activists and would-be politicians entirely
missed the boat: they stayed on in Plaça Catalunya, trying to salvage
their precious structures. After wasting a lot of effort, they partially
succeeded saving those structures, but happily their absence meant they
were not there to recuperate all of the neighborhood assemblies.
Some time in summer or fall 2011, there was another shift. Most
anarchists missed it. I certainly did, as I canât even identify when it
happened. The growing strength of the struggle was not matched by a
growth of opportunities for waging it. The labor unions would not call
another general strike, despite our attempts to pressure the minority
unions to make it happen. The struggles against austerity in education
and healthcare would not take a radical direction, even though they had
moments of intense support and had moved towards building a practice of
road blockades and occupations.
The strategic clarity of the previous months evaporated. It became
necessary to identify what we needed to struggle. We were also forced to
interrogate our relationships with others in struggle when a
transportation strike was betrayed (by its leadership? by its own base?
the argument continues) and a student strike unexpectedly cast off those
who were managing it. Clarity returned when a general strike was finally
announced for March 29, 2012. We knew how to organize for that. But the
questions of the winter had not necessarily been answered.
If the growth of a struggle can only be traced geometrically, then we
can only interpret it as defeat that the March 29 general strike was so
strong, and the general strike of November 14 the same year was so weak.
March 29 offered important lessons about organizing a strike and
fighting in the streets. Given that the unions successfully pacified the
November 14 general strike and the police dominated the streets, does
that mean that our enemies learned their lessons, and we did not learn
ours?
Looking back on the March general strike, a friend succinctly identified
the proper question, though his attitude only depressed and confounded
me at the time. Three weeks of incredibly exhausting preparation went
into making the March 29 strike and riots possible, and afterwards all
that energy dissipated, rather than coming back to us. Was it worth it?
Our exhaustion, along with the fear that the riots had produced in the
unions, precipitated another shift. The general strike called for
October 31 by the small radical unions and the general strike called for
November 14 by all the unions were not unfolding in the same context as
the glorious 29M general strike. Most anarchists could not find the
motivation to throw themselves into preparing for them. Fortunately,
this pessimism arose from a lucid social intuition. For our part, we had
still not answered the question of how to make the energy of the riot
return to us rather than dissipating as a cathartic outburst. And the
unions, for their part, were less concerned with getting a lot of people
into the street and more concerned with proving to the police that they
could keep things under control. The failure of the October and November
strikesâthe fact that they were boring, under-attended, and ultimately
demoralizingâis a victory for the struggle as long as we follow up by
exploring how to effectively create a visible, large-scale confrontation
that cannot be pacified by the unions or the police.
Unfortunately, there is a time limit for finding the answer. If it takes
too long to create another street confrontation, the collective lessons
learned in the rioting of 29M will fade away. The answer may lie in
convincing the radical unions to return to their previous combative
stance, to agitate for confrontation from within the masses summoned by
the major unions, or to return to large-scale occupations.
Whatever the outcome, anarchists were wise to save their energy rather
than try to reproduce a previous victory in changed circumstances.
One factor that has repeatedly made it possible to force struggles into
dead ends is the refusal of anarchists to substantiate their dreams.
While Barcelonaâs nihilists have frequently graced the ongoing discourse
on strategy with caustically cautionary warnings against optimism or
planning the future, they have insisted on including dreaming in the
list of luxuries that true revolutionaries are not permitted.
Unsatisfied with the implications of a strategy of total destruction for
the growing group of people who urgently need to figure out questions of
access to food, shelter, and healthcareâa group that includes many
comradesâmost anarchists have differed with the nihilists to address the
question of self-organization as a positive practice that might satisfy
all lifeâs needs.
Well into the rise of the movement for healthcare, some anarchists began
to participate critically. Even though the dismantling of public
healthcare affects them directly, they generally did not perceive the
movement as relevant to them, as it was mobilizing primarily to preserve
the welfare state and reinforce Western medicine.[7] Later on, some
anarchists discarded this apathy and began to hold debates on the
problem. A small minority took the lessons of those debates and
intervened in the movement for healthcare. Unfortunately, that
intervention took place after the movement had already broken apart on
the rocks of its own impotence.
What some comrades discovered in the course of the intervention,
nonetheless, is of great importance. Many of those active in the
movement harbored strong criticisms of Western medicine and were
amenable to critiques of the welfare state. Most of the movement seemed
to agree that healthcare was not organized in our interests even before
privatization. In group conversations, nearly everybody had stories to
share about disrespectful or harmful treatment at the hands of doctors
and hospitals. A few participants in these conversations had even
created projects for self-organizing healthcare outside and against
capitalism. Whatâs more, many of them were friends of anarchists, or
anarchists themselvesâyet most of the anarchist space was characterized
by an ignorance of their projects.
This ignorance proved not to be a coincidence. Even after the
intervention made these projects better known, anarchists almost
unanimously failed to make use of them. This was not a political
decision, as not a single critique of these projects (at least, not the
more anti-capitalist ones) ever appeared. Rather, it seemed to be
entirely a question of habit and rhythm. Anarchist militants were simply
too busy getting beaten up by copsâand skipping meals for meetings, and
subjecting themselves to who knows how much stress to support prisoners
or attend assemblies with syndicalists and socialistsâto help support an
anarchist healthcare project that at some points was even offering free
massages and other forms of therapy to any participant in social
struggles who would show up. Saint Durruti, martyr of our cause, may you
smile in your grave.
These were not additions to a long list of projects that needed more
labor power to keep from collapsing. They were projects that needed the
encouragement of people walking through the door, projects that could
give greater strength and wellbeing to anyone willing to stop being a
robot for the revolution and take a sick day every now and then.
To be clear, we are not talking about anarchists who do not know how to
stop. The impossibility of holding a debate on a Sunday morning, because
of the evident sacredness of the previous nightâs party, attests to the
dependence of Barcelona anarchists on leisure. It is not a question of
being unable to replenish themselves, but of replenishing themselves in
the manner of workers or machines. Once again, we are faced with a
contest between the imposed rhythms of capitalism and the rhythms our
bodies and struggles demand.
But it is not only a question of rhythm. Across the board, anarchists
have been hesitant to approach any question of material
self-organization. A group of people centered around the Crisi newspaper
and
âs white-collar bank robbery have formed la Cooperativa Integral
Catalana, a Catalan cooperative complex that includes consumers,
producers, healthcare workers, and eco-communes. Unlike the United
States, where cooperatives have either been a rational business decision
for farmers or an innovative form of self-managed exploitation for
radicals, cooperatives in Catalunya have a radical history. From the
1860s to the 1936 revolution, cooperatives were explicitly
anticapitalist, sometimes utopian and often revolutionary, and fully
integrated into the anarchist movementâsupporting prisoners, helping
create a libertarian culture, and equipping proletarian families to take
care of themselves in a way that set them at odds with the demands of
capitalism. They also spread practical visionsâdreams, if you willâof
how society might feed itself after a revolution. The CIC is also
anti-capitalist and entertains revolutionary pretensions. It is by no
means immune to becoming a structure for recuperation, but that is all
the more likely to happen if it is shunned by revolutionaries who have a
critique of recuperation.
While anarchists are quick to criticize or physically attack capitalist
forms of housing, food production, and healthcare, they have generally
not joined the CIC or any other project that puts anarchist social
relations into practice on a material level. By staying away, they avoid
conflict with those who would turn the cooperatives into reformist or
anodyne structures, just as they avoided conflict with those who kept
the healthcare movement in the dead end of pleading for mercy for the
welfare state.
Capitalism is failing an increasing number of people in their simple
desire to sustain themselves. This creates a ready opportunity to put
other forms of sustenance into practice, but it also poses a problem.
Other countries that suffer worse economic conditions than Spain have
already shown that precarity can precipitate mass emigration that
weakens social struggles. The same force that is beginning to oblige
anarchists and their neighbors to take extended or even permanent trips
to Scandinavia to work in kitchens or fish factories will also
disintegrate the bonds that hold together a newly coalescing society.
identified the anarchist failure to create structures in which new
social relations could be put into practice on a material level as a key
factor that allowed the Bolsheviks to hijack the Russian Revolution. The
same weakness has prevented Barcelona anarchists from enabling the major
social upheavals to become revolutionary.
Eventually, people get tired of just protesting. For a long time,
anarchists have used the inevitable failure of protest movements as
proof of the weakness of pacifism or any other practice of dissent and
demands. But people also get tired of going on strike, attending
assemblies, and burning dumpsters. If the principles of
self-organization and mutual aid are constrained to mere slogans on
posters or formulations in debates, they lose their force.
Yet these constraints derive from very real weaknesses. Something as
complicated as the self-organization of healthcare could only become
reality on the basis of a profound reskilling and widespread
participation. It has to grow from simple words to detailed dreams, and
from small-scale to larger projects. Nor will this growth be unilinear:
like everything, it will have ebbs and flows, setbacks and
disappointments. But if we are not open to this growth, if we do not
start these projects or spread these dreams, nor take part when others
doâthen who will?
Predictably, the State has deployed a new set of mechanisms to make up
for the collapse of social peace. Nationalism has been foremost among
these. In Catalunya, this has manifested in two very distinct ways:
fascist political movements, and the movement for Catalan independence.
As early as 2009, there were some in Greece who identified xenophobia as
perhaps the most important state strategy to enclose and counterattack
the insurrection. But they were few. Anarchist responses to xenophobia
and fascism were too little and too late to prevent the concerted flood
of media propaganda from redirecting popular angst away from the owning
class to the most marginalized.
In Catalunya, the situation is different. Solidarity with immigrants was
already a priority among anarchists and leftist activists before the
crisis. At the same time, the state contains powerful forces committed
to a progressive strategy of social control. The media, therefore, have
not been unanimous in encouraging xenophobia and building a base for
fascist political parties.
There is another factor that may have put fascists at a disadvantage.
Events in Catalunya forced the fascists to reveal their hand several
years earlier than might have behooved them. This deprived them of a
period of invisibility in which to build a base before going on the
offensive. The factor that forced their hand was the expansion of the
Catalan independence movement.
It could be argued that the movement for Catalan independence as such
arose during the transition from dictatorship to democracy, in order to
recuperate the struggle against the State and sap support for radical
anti-capitalists. That argument is beyond the scope of this article. In
any case, the independence movement predates the economic crisis and
does not exist as a merely recuperative force, but rather as a struggle
in its own right. However, in September 2012, the conservative political
party in power in Catalunya jumped on the bandwagon and put their
support behind a referendum for independence, which political parties in
Madrid subsequently declared illegal. Spanish military officials and
then fascist parties and street organizations have gone public declaring
war on the movement for Catalan independence.
This creates a number of conflicts, none of which is easy to understand.
Much of the Catalan elite has entered into conflict with the Spanish
elite, which further erodes the illusion of social peace and political
stabilityâeven forcing the European Union to deal with the impossible
question of national independence, a can of worms that appears on the
menu of many member states aside from Spain. But the conflict revolves
around a fictitious community of resistance that is easy for people to
join and easy for politicians to control. Just as the fascists present
the immigrant as a scapegoat to misdirect peopleâs rage, the
independence movement presents the bad government in Madrid, to be
replaced by a good government in Barcelona.
A second conflict occurs within the independence movement itself, which
has traditionally been socialist and has now been hijacked by
conservatives. Who will seize the opportunity to take power? Who will
remain true to the lurid dream of socialism, continuing the fight for a
sort of Catalan Cuba? As the movement inevitably betrays itself, the
principled part might radicalize, but as long as anarchists fail to
address the forms of oppression faced by occupied linguistic-cultural
groups (dare I say it; nations), the indepes are likely to adhere to a
nationalist vision of revolution.
Some of them are sincere allies in the fight against repression, against
austerity, and against fascism, but this is not without its own set of
complications. As anarchists work alongside socialist indepes to fight
the rising tide of fascism, they come face to face again with the
question that was first highlighted by the 2010 general strike: how to
position themselves in relation to events.
A functional component of fascism is its exceptionalism, not only in the
juridical sense meant by
, but also in how it is integrated into capitalist systems of
governance. Even though fascism and democracy are fully integrated as
complementing strategies of controlâthe unleashing of fascism by Capital
is not exceptional, but systematic and functionalâthe structure of
democracy predisposes us to experience the threat of fascism as
exceptional.
Although Barcelona should be the first place on earth where anarchists
would mistrust antifascist common fronts, this time as other times the
threat of fascism has convinced anarchists to work together with
political opportunists in uncritical alliances.
In a curious pattern, anarchists who knew very well in the plaza
occupations how to deal critically with socialists suddenly started
issuing common propaganda with them, working in the same organizational
framework. They forgot that before the crisis broke, they were already
engaging in the most effective form of organization against fascismâthe
work they were carrying out against xenophobia. It goes without saying
that anarchists always have and always must stand against fascism.
Sometimes, this requires us to occupy common spaces of struggle with
leftists. If we can only defeat the rise of fascism by pooling our
strength with leftists, it makes sense to do so. But just because we
share a common problemâfascism spells the annihilation of both
anarchists and leftistsâdoes not mean we have a common destination. We
should never stop prioritizing the communication of specifically
anarchist reasons to oppose fascism, which include our arguments against
capitalism, against the State in all its forms, and against borders.
Once some of them got scared into a common front, anarchists in
Barcelona as elsewhere put their forces behind discourses that were
essentially social democraticâattacking fascism as a violation of human
rights, thereby distinguishing it from democracy rather than revealing
the many common projects that the two systems of governance share.
Not only is this dishonest, it is also stupid. Fascist parties and
movements begin to flourish precisely because people are losing faith in
democracy. That loss of faith is a good thing. In treating fascism as an
exception, antifascist common fronts serve to reassert faith in
democratic values. The people who are suffering the most from the crisis
in capitalism have already lost faith in those values, which have
already failed them. It is no coincidence that antifascist fronts
typically exclude the most marginalized in order to present the face of
the normal citizen. They want to hide the very real crisis of
immigration, in order to pretend that democracy can still work.
Anarchists should not be arguing that we could all just get along if we
protect human rights, but rather that the crisis of immigration is a
problem of capitalism rather than ethnicity.
Even if fascism is defeated or averted, if anarchists have to abandon
their struggle against capitalism to stop it, then it will have
succeeded insofar as fascism is a tool deployed by the State to defend
capitalism in circumstances when democracy does not suffice.
When the labor unions tried to abandon the growing social upheaval after
the first general strike got out of their control, people organized a
strike through the small, radical unions, and then created entirely new
spaces of confrontation through the plaza occupations. When the plaza
occupations disappeared, anarchists intentionally organized new
assemblies conducive to debate via which we could refine our different
strategies and take measure of our collective force, countering the
dispersion that previously characterized the Barcelona anarchist space.
Though there were some attempts to unify, on the whole we resisted the
effort to create a new organization, a movement-coordinating body that
would stave off the feelings of isolation or the appearance that the
movement was disintegrating.
Such organizations tend to generate campaigns that exhaust our energies,
rather than facilitating a collective process in which we find the
struggles that rejuvenate us. They generate visibility for their own
organizational existence rather than illuminating the fault lines that
run between society and the governing apparatuses that interpenetrate
it. These new assemblies did not attempt to create a social struggle for
those who did not know how to find one, but to allow those already
participating in struggle to sharpen their strategies. Although
anarchist structures should support the participants, they should never
encourage weakness, and the inability to find lines of conflict or to
initiate a revolutionary project is a weakness anarchists cannot afford.
Struggles are not started by activists, anarchist or otherwise. Those
who seek an organization to compensate for their alienation or lack of
initiative can only be a burden to assemblies oriented towards
confrontation.
By adopting this approach before the economic crisis broke, anarchists
were poised to radicalize struggles when larger numbers of people began
taking to the streets. Carrying on isolated battles in the depths of
social peace and capitalist prosperity makes perfect sense: it limits
the options for capitalist accumulation, hastening the crisis, and puts
rebels in a stronger position when the crisis breaks.[8] Anarchists
betray that strength when they focus on the narrow economics of
austerity as soon as the opportunity comes around. Those who tend
towards populism will immediately tie their discourses to precarity and
poverty, forgetting that capitalism is equally odious in its moments of
peace and prosperity. They will lose all the strength they have built if
capitalism passes into a new era of prosperity, or if fascism or some
other political movement offers an apparent solution to the problem of
precarity.
We are anarchists specifically because we do not water down our critique
of social ills. We seek to strike the system at its roots. Positioning
ourselves in conflict with both the dominant system and its potential
recuperation also means not focusing on the conflicts that are the most
visible, and sometimes illusory, like the conflict between workers and
austerity measures. In fact, work and austerity exist in harmony. The
true conflict is harder to elucidate, but it is our job to reveal it.
One way Capital has mediated this conflict is by imposing its rhythms on
our lives, including our struggles. Social upheavals will always be
followed by lulls of disappointment and apparent inactivity. Accepting
these troughs and knowing how to take advantage of them is the key to
preventing upheaval from being merely a flash in the pan.
To spark new upheavals, or at least be present at their beginnings, we
need to hone our social intuition. When we understand how other people
perceive their problems, we will be able to make or at least recognize a
call to arms that speaks to them. For these upheavals to push past
stagnation, they must avail themselves of structures for the
revolutionary self-organization of life. We may create some of these
structures, but many more will arise independently. Anarchists should
connect with those who create them, even and especially if they are not
revolutionary. Recuperation is not inevitable in spontaneous structures;
it is the successful institutionalization of the structures that do not
succeed in connecting with a struggle for the destruction of the
existing order. The tendency towards creation is an essentially
liberating tendency that capitalism consistently harnesses. But it is
the harness, and not the creation, that constitutes recuperation.
Learn to care for one another in practical ways.
new bouts of struggle, and give up on them. In Barcelona, this has meant
activist projects like the mutual aid networks that made sense in a
certain moment: projects that in theory should put us in contact with
others who want to struggle, but in practice rarely do.
radicals. The purpose of these spaces is not to generate action, but to
encourage reflection on our ongoing practices. Such spaces also
strengthen new relationships of camaraderie. If people have the energy
to go back on the offensive, these spaces will provide the necessary
density to avoid dispersion and inspire action.
leftists.
Consider the benefits of highly visible, daytime sabotage actions, or
actions that serve as invitations to illegality while also making
peopleâs lives easier, like forcibly opening up the metro for free
riders or raiding supermarkets to distribute groceries. Do not feel
obliged to keep up a high rhythm of attacks.
keep people seeing each other and remind neighbors that the struggle is
ongoing. These might include noise demos in support of those facing
repression, or setting up a literature table in a public place.
capitalism were destroyed, like carpentry or dentistry. Encourage your
friends to learn such skills. Discourage them from embarking on a life
path that is premised on the persistence of capitalism.
intensification of relations of collective self-organization, like
clinics, gardens, and workshops. If none exist that suit your talents,
talk with friends about starting one. Begin the discussion with
questions like these: How we do this in such a way that it sustains us
rather than exhausting us? How can this serve as an invitation to our
neighbors to begin to abandon capitalist ways of life? How can this
support those on the front lines of the social war?
awareness and outrage among your neighbors, coworkers, and other people
you interact with. Organize visible events such as potlucks in a public
place at which people can symbolically support those facing repression.
Go door to door if you have to.
tours that weave together the heroic battles of the previous century
with those of last year. Weâve been fighting this war for hundreds of
years; we will be for hundreds of years to come. Every scarred
revolutionary who resists burnout and holds true into old age, and every
young anarchist who does not have to start from scratch, constitute a
victory against oblivion.
This is the final installment in our âAfter the Crestâ series exploring
how to navigate the waning phase of social movements. It is a personal
reflection on anarchist participation in the
2012 student strike in Montréal
and the disruptions that accompanied it. The product of much collective
discussion, this article explores the opportunities anarchists missed
during the high point of the conflict by limiting themselves to the
framework of the strike, and the risks they incurred by attempting to
maintain it once it had entered a reformist endgame.
For a narrative account of many of the events discussed in this text,
read
While the Iron Is Hot: Student Strike and Social Revolt in Montréal, Spring 2012
.
February 13, 2012. After many months of ultimatums to the government,
mobilization on university and cégep campuses, and occasional actions
and demonstrations, the student strike officially begins with a few
departments at Université Laval in Québec City. From there, it spreads
rapidly. Spring has come early.
February 16. The student association of Cégep du Vieux Montréal votes to
go on strike; the school is occupied. Late in the night, police enter
the school and break up the occupation.
March 15. After weeks of escalating violence on the part of the police,
including an incident in which a cégep student lost his eye to a
concussion grenade, the COBPâs annual demonstration against police
brutality begins at Berri Square; the crowd that gathers is
significantly larger than at any other time in the history of the event,
and a night riot ensues. Although many participants escape, over 226 are
arrested.
March 22. The largest demonstration of the strike thus far is an
ultimatum from the Coalition large de lâAssociation pour une solidaritĂ©
syndicale étudiante (CLASSE) to the Liberal government in Québec City:
repeal your planned tuition hike, or we will begin a campaign of
economic disruption. Although actions to this effect had already been
taking place in Montréal, from this point on, they to begin to occur
more frequently and with more ambitious objectives.
April 20. The Salon Plan Nord, a job fair, takes place at the Palais des
congrĂšs. Jean Charest is there to deliver a speech about his
governmentâs plan for the accelerated development of QuĂ©becâs portion of
the Labrador Peninsulaâland which is still inhabited, for the most part,
by indigenous people determined to live as sovereign, autonomous
nations. The single largest street battle of the strike unfolds,
paralyzing a large section of downtown for hours and capturing
international headlines. For the first time in the strike, cops flee
demonstrators. Its significance is
to anarchists. Yet no one can predict how intense things will get.
May 4. A truce between the students and the government has come and
gone. Angry night demonstrations have taken the streets, then been
pacified; morning blockades of highways, skyscrapers, and other targets
have ceased altogether. People have barely caught their breath from the
largest anti-capitalist May Day demonstration in recent memory. And now
buses from across the province are unloading militants of all sorts in
the small town of Victoriaville; the goal is to disrupt the Liberal
Party convention that was scheduled to take place at a Montréal hotel,
then hastily transplanted to the countryside. The clash between
demonstrators and the Sûreté du Québec police force is brutal; people on
both sides are badly injured, but the red squares get the worst of it.
Another person loses an eye; still another is put into a coma. Things
donât feel as good as they did two weeks prior.
May 10. The streets of Montréal have been peaceful for a few days, but
this morning, smoke bombs go off in four métro stations across the city;
the whole system is shut down for hours. Thanks to a good citizen with a
cellphone, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) releases
pictures of some suspects on its website the same day, and four people
surrender at a police station soon thereafter.
May 18. Two new laws come into effect at midnight, both of which
restrict the ability of participants in the strike movement to act. The
night demonstrations turn confrontational again around this time, but
despite heroic efforts against the police, the movement is unable to
assert itself in the streets as effectively as it did a month earlier.
That said, more people are participating than ever before. Spontaneous
demonstrations begin in neighborhoods across Montréal, helping new
neighborhood assemblies to take off.
June 7. The Canadian Grand Prix begins with a rich bastardsâ gala.
Militants fail to disrupt it, but over the next few days, despite a
seriously compromised rapport de force with the police, they succeed in
disrupting MontrĂ©alâs most important tourist event of the summer. Many
inspiring things happen; yet it is clear that the movement is on the
decline.
August 1. Confirming what people have suspected for weeks, the premier
calls a general election for September 4. The Parti Québécois asks the
movement to agree to an âelectoral truce.â
August 13. Classes at some cégeps are scheduled to begin. School
authorities, however, shut down classes so that anti-strike students can
attend general assemblies on the matter of continuing the strike. Of the
four cégeps voting on this matter, three vote to end the strike; they
join schools that had voted similarly in the days prior. Except for a
few departments at UQĂM, the strike collapses almost entirely over the
next few weeksâthough demonstrations continue, sometimes turning
confrontational.
September 4. When the votes are counted, the PQ has won a majority in
the National Assembly. The tuition hike is canceled by decree a few days
later. Some call it victory.
Anarchists should hone our skills at anticipating social upheavals.[9]
Sometimes, such events can be seen coming far in advance, offering us
the chance to prepare in order to surpass the limitations of the
organizations, discourse, and default tactics that are likely to
characterize them. That was the case in Montréal in the summer of 2011,
by which time it was perfectly clear that a student strike was on the
way. By the middle of summer, it was widely known that the major student
federations, ASSĂ, FĂCQ, and FĂUQ, were collaborating for a massive
demonstration on November 10. This demonstration was conceived as
presenting the Liberal government with an ultimatum before the movement
resorted to an unlimited general strike. Earlier in 2011, the
occupation of the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin
, had taken me and many other anarchists across the continent by
surprise. In Montréal, on the other hand, we had advance warning of
things to come; it was clear to some of us that we could make strategic
use of this knowledge.
A correct analysis of any situation, combined with reflection on oneâs
own objectives, should suggest a strategy with which to proceed.[10] But
how do we refine our analytical skills? I donât want to reduce this to
experience; plenty of âveteransâ analyze situations badly, routinely
making the same mistakes. In Montréal, that camp includes those who
fetishize direct democracy, certain types of collective process, and the
global justice movement that peaked here in the mobilization against the
2001 Summit of the Americas in Québec City. Québécois insurrectionists
tend to dismiss that crowdâperhaps too hastilyâas being attached to a
romanticized notion of anti-capitalist struggle in Montréal at the turn
of the millennium. And yet older insurrectionists are also guilty of
using the same tactics that theyâve been using for years, often with no
better sense of the political context than the younger people they are
lecturing.
Rather than deferring to age and experience, we can sharpen our
analytical skills through discussion groups, general assemblies oriented
towards communication as an end in itself, and more writing, theorizing,
and critique. These are the processes that enable a crew, a community,
or a distributed network of subversives to gain mutual understanding and
refine their analyses in order to speak precisely about what is
happening, what must be done, andâmost importantlyâhow to do it. It is
essential to find the time and space to do this with people you trust,
whose analysis you also trust, and ideally who come from a range of
backgrounds and experience.
This isnât a recipe for success. The future canât be foreseen with total
accuracy. But things sometimes play out in similar ways over and over
again. There are patterns we can identify. We have a better chance of
finding them if many of us are looking, and even better if we disagree
on some things and draw on different knowledge.
If anarchists donât improve our ability to foresee events, we will keep
repeating two grievous mistakes. First, we wonât know when itâs time for
us to throw ourselves into a struggle with everything weâve gotâwhen the
risks are worth the possible consequences. Alas, many anarchists in
Montréal waited until far later than would have been ideal to get
involved in the student strike. Second, we wonât recognize when we
should withdraw because the movement is headed toward a catastrophe that
will hurt usâas the events of August 2012 did, at the end of the strike.
Once the school year started, some anglophone anarchists from outside
the university, or who were students but who mostly organized outside of
student spaces, made a concerted effort to insert themselves and
anarchist ideas in general into student organizing at McGill and
Concordia. This was sometimes as sloppy and disorganized as the
individual anarchists involved. But that didnât matter; what mattered
was consistency. Local anarchistsâ distribution of certain texts at
McGill, such as After the Fall and
âCommuniquĂ© from an Absent Future,â
probably contributed significantly to the occupations that occurred on
McGill campus during the 2011â12 school year, both before the strike
even started.
Many of the texts distributed were written in inaccessible
insurrectionist jargon; anarchists often came off as total wingnuts. But
the point was not to appeal to the masses. It was to make connections
with specific people who would be participating in the strike when it
beganâ a process that was developed further by inviting people to events
at La Belle Ăpoque, the newly-opened anarchist social center in the
Southwest, or just by hanging out. This, in turn, encouraged those
people to expand the discourse of the strike to other areas: struggle in
defense of the Earth, against the police, against racism and
colonialism, and so on.
Student militants at the UniversitĂ© du QuĂ©bec Ă MontrĂ©al (UQĂM) and
Cégep du Vieux Montréal had been organizing for much longer. These two
schools, from which other strikes had historically emerged, were also
the source of most of the momentum for the 2012 strike. Although both
schools already had a strong radical presence, political graffiti within
certain buildings was ramped up in the years before the strike.
Occupations and demonstrations were organized. In early 2011,
Hydro-QuĂ©becâs downtown headquarters was smoke-bombed by students from
Vieux, forcing an evacuation. There was also a lot of work behind the
scenesâdistributing propaganda, organizing informative assemblies, and
the like. Syndicalist anarchists participated actively in their student
associations and in the Association pour une solidarité syndicale
Ă©tudiante (ASSĂ); this meant office work, balancing finances, writing
articles for ASSĂâs newspaper Ultimatum or for individual associationsâ
broadsheets, and a lot of organizing limited by the discourse of the
official student movement. Some anarchists have been critical of this
approach, but thereâs no question that anarchists on the whole benefited
from the fact that some people were doing this.
Syndicalist methods created the strike; it could be argued that they
also created the limitations that would ultimately produce the
movementâs downfall. A point that is sometimes missed, however, is that
every social upheaval will have built-in limitations, and there isnât
even a chance to overcome those limitations until the upheaval exists as
a material reality. Despite the tensions that existed between various
anti-capitalist and pro-strike factions at CĂ©gep du Vieux and UQĂM, it
is clear that the lowest-common-denominator mobilization approach of
creating opposition to the tuition hike complemented direct action, if
only by fostering a political environment in which other students could
understand why âthe issuesâ were serious enough that some people would
take such action.
Crises create opportunities. This is perhaps the most important maxim
for anyone who wants to defend land, freedom, and dignity against the
ravages of capitalism. In this context, it is problematic that many
anarchists, in the years before the strike, were willfully ignorant of
the political machinations that produced the flashpoint of the strike.
It took a long time for anarchists who had been following the
developments to convince their comrades of the importance of the
impending events.
Of course, given the right circumstances and skill sets, we can generate
crises ourselves. This is exactly what some anarchists, upon finding
themselves as students at institutions with a tradition of direct
democracy and a history of strike-making, proceeded to do in the years
leading up to 2012âjust as other anarchists had done in the years
leading up to 2005 and earlier strikes.
Anglophone anarchists in MontrĂ©alâmany of whom grew up in other
provinces or in the US, whose French is marginal at best, often
possessed of rather few francophone friends, frequently either
university dropouts or enrolled at schools with less interesting
political culturesâwere usually not as disposed to help produce a
crisis. This was also true of older anarchists, those with jobs, or
those on welfare and genuinely poor; in essence, non-student anarchists
of all language backgrounds. But, though anarchists from certain social
positions may not have been able to contribute as much to making the
strike happen, there was plenty for those people to do to improve their
capacity to participate in the strike once it began.
The most important thing is consistencyâdoing what you can from where
you are. It doesnât matter how limited your abilities or social position
are. If you donât drop the ball, youâll eventually get a chance to
shoot.
If you donât drop the ball,
youâll eventually get a chance to shoot.
Though some prepared for the strike itself, few did anything to prepare
for the situation that arose from it: the peak of opportunity.
There were two such periods, actually. One started on April 20, 2012,
with the
protests against the Plan Nord conference
, during which it became clear that the police were temporarily
outmatched, and lasted until May 4, when it degenerated into more brutal
and less inspiring violence at the Liberal Party convention in
Victoriaville. This was a period when so much could have been done, and
yet many insurrecto-hooligans contented themselves with mere riotingâas
exciting as that may have been. Soon enough, it was no longer fun. It
wasnât just random unfortunates with presumably little street experience
who were getting arrested and injured, but ourselves and our friends as
well. This is all the worse because almost anything could have happened
in Montréal at that time if people had been able to step back from the
whirlwind of events, gather their comrades, identify an objective, and
act.
In point of fact, it seems this did happen, but perhaps too late. On May
10, the most effective sabotage of the Montréal métro to date took
place, with smoke bombs going off at four different stations across the
city. If such an act had occurred during a large demonstration or riot
in downtown Montréal, it could have created an even more uncontrollable
situation across the islandâperhaps opening new windows of opportunity
for anarchists and others to seize territory or go on the offensive. By
May 10, however, an uneasy peace had taken hold in Québec with the
pacification of the night demonstrations and the passing of the last
spectacular clashes during daylight hours, May Day and the Battle of
Victo. In this context, the smoke bombing incident appeared as a daring
attempt to reignite conflict, not as a conscious effort to expand its
scope at the height of things.
The period that started on April 20 was not a revolutionary moment, but
perhaps only because no one proposed, via words or action, to take the
logical step from mass vandalism to the collective expropriation of
goods and seizure of buildingsâthe kind of activity that would have
quickly brought out even larger crowds than were already participating
in the strike. Things might have gotten a little nasty after that, no
doubt, especially given the lengths to which the state is willing to go
to uphold the institution of private property. But had things escalated
to this point, the revolutionary potential of the situation would have
become apparent to everyone.
There was a second peak of opportunity a few weeks later, and it too was
squandered.
To be clear, the opportunities that this second peak presented were not
produced by militantsâ capacity to maintain a rapport de force with the
police. On the nights immediately before and after the government passed
its Special Law to crack down on the strike, there were major street
battles that lasted long into the night, probably involving the largest
numbers of any post-sundown street action and certainly producing the
largest mass arrests. But while many experienced these clashes as
inspiring, including many out-of-town anarchists who had shown up for
the anarchist book fair, the battles proved ephemeral. They were the
final and most spectacular clashes of a movement that was rapidly losing
the capacity to go toe-to-toe with the police that it had gained in the
early months of the strike, and particularly between March 22 and May 4.
New opportunities were produced, though, by the expansion of
anti-government sentiment to parts of society that hadnât previously
been involved in the strike. Suddenly, there were small roving
demonstrations in neighborhoods across the city and in cities across the
province. A sizeable number of these people were said to have supported
the tuition hike, but fundamentally objected to the governmentâs
âanti-democraticâ means of defending the capitalist economy and its
monopoly on violence. The numbers also grew downtown; the demonstration
on May 22 may have had as many as 400,000 people.
This opened up a moment akin to the Occupy moment in other places.[11]
What happened is that people with radically different ideas were meeting
in the streets, vaguely united by their opposition to how things were
going in their society. Perhaps they were excited by the energy of the
moment; perhaps they were open to challenging preconceived notions about
how things should be, and how to get there.
This didnât happen on the scale that it could have. Many anarchists
cited the shortcomings of the casserole demos and the neighborhood
assemblies to justify not engaging with them. Of course, there were
shortcomings; thatâs to be expected whenever people more familiar with
obedience to authority suddenly opt for defiance. Their strategies,
rhetoric, analysis, and even attitudes werenât always ideal from an
ideologically purist anarchist perspective. But this was as true of
those who fought in the streetsâincluding those young and patriotic
Québécois men who saw their combat with the police as a continuation of
the FLQâs hypermasculine methodologyâas it was of those who opted to
bang pots and pans or to participate in the âpopular neighborhood
assembliesâ that had, in many cases, devolved after a few weeks into
hangout spaces for all the local weirdos interested in radical politics.
The important thing here is that the confrontations of the book fair
weekend marked the point when street fighting downtown started to
deliver diminishing returns, in terms of its ability to disrupt the
capitalist economy and improve the movementâs rapport de force with the
government. At that point, it was probably more feasible to broaden the
disturbances than to escalate the ones already taking place.
Both peaks of opportunity, starting on April 20 and May 18 respectively,
involved peak numbers of people engaging in particular activitiesâeither
the specific activity of fighting the police during the first peak, or
the general activity of participating in the strike movement during the
second. These were our chance to reach out to all the people whose
political analyses, experiences, or backgrounds were different from
ours. Most of them knew what they were there to do. If anarchists had
articulated to others a method of how to do it while also encouraging
people to go farther, itâs possible that the movement could have reached
still higher peaks.
The strike didnât die over the course of the summer. It stagnated.
After the Grand Prix, the demonstrations and meetings continuedâquite a
lot, in fact, albeit less than during the spring. June 22 and July 22
saw tens of thousands of people come out; not a single night
demonstration failed to take the streets. There was a bit of a ruckus in
Burlington, Vermont, when premiers and governors in the northeastern
part of the continent met there at the end of July. Plans were drawn up
for a convergence for the rentrée (the return to classes and the
recommencement of the suspended semester) in August, starting first at
cégeps and then moving on to universities.
All of this happened, yet none of it materially improved the strikeâs
prospects for defending itself, particularly in the face of an election
campaignâone of the most effective tactics democratic states have at
their disposal to shut down social movements. It had been suspected for
weeks, then essentially confirmed in the days immediately prior, but
Jean Charest, the premier, made the official announcement on August 1.
The Parti Québécois offered a deal to the movement: settle down a bit,
weâll win this election, and then weâll suspend the hike. It was argued,
not unreasonably, that disruptive activity could hurt the PQâs chances
of beating the incumbent Liberals. Consequently, pacifist vigilantes
stepped up their efforts to interfere with confrontational tactics at
the night demonstrations, and the cégeps unanimously voted against the
continuation of the strike. The strike did continue in some departments
at UQĂM, but the effect was marginal, and efforts to enforce a shutdown
of classes were undermined by scabs, security, and police.
Anarchists had taken many risks and suffered severe consequences in
their efforts to strengthen and embolden the movement as a whole. Many
had already been beaten and arrested, and faced charges and uncertain
futures. More than any other political tendency involved in the strike,
anarchists were the ones who escalated the situation to the point that
Jean Charest was forced to call an early election to end the crisis. Yet
despite our best efforts, we had become foot soldiers for a movement
that had always had a nationalist, social-democratic, and reformist
character. Now this movement no longer needed us to win its
unimaginative and ultimately shortsighted baseline objective: the
cancellation of this specific tuition hike. It became difficult to avoid
the conclusion that we had been used. Many of us felt, perhaps
irrationally, that our efforts over the past few months had been utterly
in vain. We told ourselves that we had gained experience, friends, and
so on, that we had been part of something âhistoric,â but this sort of
positive rhetoric failed to improve morale. In some cases, it just made
things worse.
Since the strikeâs end, many anarchists have argued that we failed to
apply the right tactics to the situation. What could we have done
differently? What would have produced a greater success for us in
August?
But this line of critique may miss the mark. Perhaps we should step back
and ask whether it was strategic for anarchists to try to revive the
strike after militancy had withered over the summer. At the time,
everyone embraced the âcommon senseâ assumption that the top priority
was to keep the strike alive. Hindsight is 20/20, but the negative
consequences of that approach should have been predictable.
Maybe, instead, we should have just gotten out of there.
Now, I am not proposing that we should have withdrawn all support from
the strike, but that we should have withdrawn some forms of support,
especially the ones that involved considerable personal risk. Anarchists
had previously proven capable of this. Many anarchists withdrew at the
right time during the occupation of Cégep du Vieux Montréal and the
night riot of March 15. In doing so, they left less experienced
participants to face their fate aloneâresulting in mass arrests in both
cases. This was a little callous, no doubt; but during both events,
anarchists made a point of offering advice to people who were making
some pretty questionable decisions about how to conduct themselves.
Anarchists eventuallyâand in my opinion, correctlyâdecided to take care
of themselves once it was clear that things were about to get ugly and
that their suggestions were falling on deaf ears. And in the aftermath,
anarchists organized support for those arrested.
Regarding the strike as a whole, getting out wouldnât mean, for example,
anarchists suddenly abandoning their critical support of the idea of
free education. A common denominator position among anarchists in
QuĂ©bec, from syndicalists to anti-civ nihilist types, is that QuĂ©becâs
privileged proletariat deserves the nice things in lifeâlike a useless
liberal arts educationâat least as much as QuĂ©becâs even more privileged
ruling class. To say it differently: âIf capitalism, then at least
welfare capitalism.â
Making a strategic exit wouldnât have stopped anarchists from
intervening where it made sense to do so, eitherâbut it would have meant
that anarchists ceased helping the student movement whenever it
stumbled, talking confidence into it whenever it hesitated, and trying
to knock some sense into it whenever it was about to go in a stupid
direction. In many ways, anarchists related to the student movement the
way you might relate to a partnerâin this case, an overly dependent
partner who was not very appreciative of the help we often offered him
unconditionally, sometimes was downright emotionally abusive, and
really, do we even like this guy that much?
But anarchists often lack self-confidence. Sometimes we donât know when
itâs time to cut our losses and move on. We were under the impression
that we needed the strike to go on in order to continue building up our
own power. Yes, we had invested a lot in the movement, and it would have
felt wrong just to pull out and let it do its own thingâwhich, no doubt,
would have left us shaking our heads in exasperation. But was it really
a good idea to invest even more in it when things were evidently headed
in an ugly direction?
Our efforts to revive the movement did a lot to hurt the momentum that
anarchists in Montréal had been building, in stops and starts, for
yearsâsince long before the strike. This set us up for disappointment
and depression, needlessly demoralizing and demobilizing us. The problem
was that we were pursuing a grossly unrealistic objective. The option of
continuing the strike, especially given the general decline in
confrontational activity during the early part of the summer, simply
could not compete with the option of electoral compromise with the PQ.
Democratic ideas have significantly greater sway in the student movement
and among the general population than anarchist ideas. As unfortunate as
this is, we should recognize this and act accordingly.
The worst thing about the decision to prioritize continuing the strike
was that, at that point, there were plenty more interesting and
worthwhile paths open. For example, we could have focused on resisting
and counteracting state repression. Repression had affected anarchists
the most severely, but it also affected revolutionaries from other
tendenciesâmost significantly Maoistsâas well as many people who had
simply been caught up in the energy of the strike and received criminal
charges as a result.
During the spring, anarchists organized some powerful noise
demonstrations, and there were also actions at MontrĂ©alâs courthouse,
the Palais de justice. After the strike was over, in fall 2012, a large
and spirited demonstration took to the streets in solidarity with
everyone facing charges, living with restrictive conditions, or
otherwise suffering as a result of things they had been accused of doing
during the strike. Various texts appeared on this topic, as well. Yet at
the end of the summer, during the period of the election and the
rentrée, there was no organizing to speak of on that front.
The only thing anarchists did collectively in August, besides attempting
to stop the rentrée, was to campaign against representative democracy
itself. This could have been a promising terrain of struggle, but almost
everyone involved was also wrapped up in the losing battle of continuing
the strike. Things didnât turn out well on either frontâbut even more
importantly, both undertakings were posited by the anarchists involved
as being in solidarity with the student movement, when it was precisely
the student movement that was facilitating the isolation and repression
of anarchists by abandoning the strike.
In other words, the student movement was acting contrary to the
principle of solidarity. And by buying into the PQâs proposal for an
âelectoralâ truce, the student movement sabotaged its own most basic
objective, with the PQ ultimately implementing indexation rather than a
true tuition freeze.
As a side point, itâs both facile and inaccurate to blame movement
leaders and politicians for this turn of events. The strike was voted
down in directly democratic assemblies. No matter how loud and
influential certain individuals were, it was the students as a whole who
chose to abandon the strike.
The hopeless attempt to save the student movement from itself took away
from the effectiveness of anarchistsâ anti-democratic campaign. It was
basically the same people doing everything, and they didnât have the
energy to do everything; their energies were split between appealing to
students to keep the strike going, and appealing to society at large not
to vote.
Anarchists saw these as identical, which was a poor understanding of the
social reality. For one thing, there was the statist, reformist,
pro-voting stance of the majority of the student movementâs
participantsâbut do we really need to beat that particular dead horse
any longer?
Meanwhile, a lot of people living in Montréal have a difficult time
simply surviving because of the neighborhood they live in, the color of
their skin, their lack of citizenship or status, or their accent in
Frenchâif they can speak it at all. Thereâs no doubt that plenty of
marginalized folks were down with at least certain aspects of the
student movement. But neither is there any doubt that most of them had
only limited interest in the self-centered struggle of a bunch of
privileged brats who, broadly speaking, did not reciprocate by
concerning themselves with the more dire struggles of migrants,
indigenous people, and others.[12]
Now, Iâm not saying you need to take off your red square if you want to
start talking to such people about the moral bankruptcy of democracy.
But maybe the fact that the PQ is going to sell out the movement
shouldnât be the center of your analysis if you want to address people
who arenât particularly invested in the movement. All the adamant social
democrats to whom anarchistsâ analysis of the situation might have been
usefulâgiven that they were legitimately seeking a freeze, not
indexationâwere completely unwilling to listen to anarchists during
election time. That was their mistake. But our mistake was to keep
trying to get through to the social democrats rather than reaching out
to others who might have been a little more open had we been less
alienating.
Itâs hard to imagine that the results could have been worse than what
actually happened if, instead of trying to engage students and other
participants or supporters of the movement with anti-electoral ideas,
anarchists had used the same time and energy to advance a critique of
QuĂ©bĂ©cois democracy by other means. Sure, Iâm skeptical that dropping a
banner emblazoned with the words NEVER VOTE! NEVER SURRENDER! Ă BAS LA
SOCIĂTĂ-PRISON «DĂMOCRATIQUE!» from a train bridge in a neighborhood
full of francophone pensioners, then failing to publicize that this even
happened, is the best use of anyoneâs time. But as confusing, poorly
contextualized, and silly as that might be, at least it speaks for
itself without centralizing the studentsâ struggle to preserve their
privileged position in society.
Itâs interesting to think about what other projects anarchists could
have undertaken, unencumbered by the student movement. What if
anarchists, in neighborhood assemblies or more informally, had pushed a
struggle against gentrification and manifestations of capitalism in the
areas where we actually live, while police resources were tied up
watching night demonstrations and maintaining order downtown? In other
wordsâwhat if we had taken advantage of the political situation to
improve our own long-term material position, rather than improving the
rapport de force between the government and the students?
We also could have done more to usurp the megaphone, both literally and
figuratively. This happened earlier in the strike: on the night of March
7, after a demonstrator lost his eye to an SPVM grenade, anarchists
shouted down a few self-appointed leadersâ appeals for people to express
their outrage peacefully, successfully convincing the majority of the
crowd to stop standing around in Berri Square and either physically
confront the police or at least defy their commands to disperse. There
were attacks on two different police stations that night, the first such
actions of the strike.
In August, as on March 7, there were crowds of outraged people, but this
time, they werenât outraged about police violence. Instead, as an
outvoted minority, they were upset by their fellow studentsâ decision to
abandon the strike. The situation was a bit different: to go the
fighting route would have meant ignoring the final verdict of a directly
democratic vote, not just a few people with megaphones. In retrospect,
itâs not clear how many people would ever have been willing to do that,
given that the authority of such a vote is almost universally accepted
in the galaxy of Québécois student politics. But alas, it seems that, in
the aftermath of those disastrous student assemblies, there was no one
even able to bring up the idea to the hardly insignificant number of
militants (student and otherwise) suddenly bereft of previous monthsâ
democratic justification for continuing the fight.
Pursuing a hard line against nationalists and their discourse would also
have divided and weakened the movement, but it would have publicized
anarchistsâ position on the Parti QuĂ©bĂ©cois in clear terms. It would
have offered an opportunity to call out their racist Muslim baiting in
pursuit of the xenophobe vote, and their noxious valorization of French
colonization on this continent. Had harsh critiques of CLASSE and/or
ASSĂ come out when the strike was still in motion, rather than
, this would also have divided the movement, albeit instructively. But
if the movement is going to lose anyway, why not divide it?
It was clear after a certain point in August, if not earlier, that
things were rapidly coming to a close. This was an inevitable result of
the efforts of nationalists, social democrats, and others who had always
been pursuing a conflicting agenda. Revolutionary struggle can be an
ugly business, and there are times when it makes sense for us to hold
our noses and work with people whose politics we consider objectionable.
We should never attack or alienate those we dislike for no good reason.
But, at the end of the strike, the benefits of making an open break were
clear.
This is particularly important in light of the student movementâs
unforgivable failure to support those who were facing judicially imposed
conditions including exile from the Island of Montréal, non-association
with friends or lovers, and the possibility of serious jail time in the
future. It doesnât matter whether the accused did what the state charged
them with; the point is that illegal activity was essential to whatever
success the strike had, and letting anyone suffer because the state
pinned some of that activity on them sets a bad precedent for strikes to
come. Thatâs the strategic argument, anywayâthe ethical one should be
obvious.
In short, anarchists could have done many things other than what we did
do, which was to stay at the core of the movement. It was already clear
by the weekend of the Grand Prix that the movement was on its way out;
the events of June and July (or the lack thereof) confirmed this. Yet
anarchists continued participating in general assemblies and committee
meetings; to be precise, anarchists either returned to those spaces
after having left them, or came to them for the very first time during
the whole strike. This was done out of a mistaken belief that it was
necessary to do so, that the struggle depended on the revival of the
strike.
The end of the strike was marked by a pronounced failure to address the
widespread phenomenon of post-strike depression. We might better
identify this as post-uprising depression, common anywhere that has
experienced sustained periods of social rupture.
Many windows opened during the strike, but now we find ourselves
âbetween strikes,â as some people say here, which is to say in a period
of demobilization. Compared to the spring of 2012, it feels unusually
difficult to pull off even the simplest things.
Depression is an understandable but unfortunate response to the end of
the strike. Itâs useless, and a little cruel, to tell people that they
shouldnât feel sad about something that is an objectively depressing
turn of events from an anarchist adventuristâs standpoint. Like any
period of social rupture, the strike offered an exciting and dangerous
context, presenting challenges to anyone caught up in it. To be sure,
not everyone wants excitement, danger, or inconvenience. Many people
would prefer to drive down rue Sainte-Catherine without worrying about
giant demonstrations, or go to school without running into hard pickets,
or take the métro without fear of a smoke bomb attack or bags of bricks
on the rails. In contrast, the kind of person whoâs going to becomeâand
remainâan active, attack-oriented anarchist probably thrives on that
sort of thing.
This is adventurism: the sin of actually enjoying the struggles we
participate in. We may not all like the same things, or be capable of
the same types of action, but our common threadâregardless of divergent
physical ability, tactical preferences, skill sets, resources, and
social privilegesâis that we are fighters. The restoration of social
peace deprives us of something we need. This peace is an illusion, and
the social war continues, but itâs harder to position ourselves
offensively when itâs no longer playing out in the streets every day and
nightâwhen thousands of people no longer see themselves as participants,
having returned to the old routines of work or school or skid life.
There are lots of different ways to cope with depression. Hedonism is
one way; after the strike ended, there was a heavy turn in some circles
towards alcohol consumption, drug use, and hardcore partying. Another
way is to switch gears entirely: some left town or put all of their
energy into single-issue organizing, while others threw themselves back
into school or art or earning money. Some of these means of coping were
healthier than others. But as a whole, they all contributed to isolating
people from one another and atomizing the struggle.
It was worse for the sizeable number of anarchists who stuck it out
longer, trying to do exactly what they had been doing a few months
earlier: going to demonstrations, mobilizing people for them, trying to
hype people up and âmake things happen.â After the electoral victory of
the PQ, this simply didnât work anymore. The problem wasnât just that
many anarchists had quit the strike by that time (although that
certainly did have an impact). The problem was that anarchists in
MontrĂ©al didnât quit collectively. Instead, we quit one at a time, and
often only once we had reached a maximum of exhaustion, a low of misery,
or both.
Of course, itâs a stretch to speak of anarchists in MontrĂ©al doing
anything in a coordinated way. There are simply too many organizations,
nodes, social scenes, and affinity groupsâeach of which has its own
distinct goals, outlook, and capacity. But none of these groups withdrew
explicitly from the strike. Formal anarchist organizations in the city,
except for a few propaganda outfits into heavy theory, had never fully
engaged themselves in the strike as organizations.[13] It was
individuals, usually working with others on the basis of friendship, who
made the decision whether to drop out. The informal associations of
people who worked closely together during the strike never met to
discuss what people could do together as the strike was winding down.
Consequently, these associations mostly evaporated with the strike.
There were many intentional discussions in June and July, announced
ahead of time through social media and listservs, but most of these were
focused on âthe tasks at handââblocking the upcoming rentrĂ©e and
continuing the strike. In my own circles, there was never time or space
to talk about how people felt about the situation as a whole, how they
felt about their own personal situations, or what they hoped to get out
of continuing to engage with the strike. Nor were there many discussions
between people who felt political affinity with one another, or who
cared about maintaining positive relationships with one another more
than they cared about abstract political objectives.
During the spring, we shared some incredible moments together. We
flipped over police cars, partied in the streets, forced cops to run for
their lives, painted the halls of university buildings according to our
tastes, made out with strangers during street parties that became riots,
and generally lived life to the fullest. It wasnât all good, but the
parts that were good were really good. Over the summer, like many other
people, I made the mistake of attributing all that to the strike, rather
than to the specific people who were in the streets acting to create
those moments. The strike created the context in which those people were
able to act together: it brought large numbers into the streets, it
facilitated us running into each other over and over again, it
frustrated and overwhelmed the forces that defend the capitalist
economy.
But the strike had no agency of its own. It was itself the product of
human agencyâand by no means only the agency of anarchists. Although we
were an influential minority in some regards, such as determining how
confrontational the demonstrations were, we were not actually that
important. Another influential minority consisted of careerist student
politicians who were able to influence other aspects of the strike, like
which images and narratives of the strike were broadcast on television
and blogspace, much more effectively than we could.
Anarchists neednât have been depressed by the end of the strike. This
isnât a macho admonishment that people shouldnât let their feelings get
the best of them; I donât think the answer is for us to become coldly
rational revolutionaries who move in a Terminator-like linear fashion
towards our objectives. We are emotional creatures, and that is for the
best. My criticism is that we staked our morale, our passion to fight,
on the wrong thing: not on the health of the relationships of people
seeking to be dangerous together, but on the health of the strike as a
force that could interrupt capitalist law and orderâwhich many of the
people who created the strike never saw as a goal in itself, but only as
a temporary means to a reformist goal.
As the strike was winding down, I should have dedicated more time to
making connections with all those potential friends. There was one
demonstration in August that I knew would be boring, but I went anyway.
I saw someone there Iâd seen a dozen times since February. He recognized
me, too, and made a reference to the sort of thing we should have been
doing. I laughed, but I didnât keep talkingâeven though that was the
last chance Iâd see him. I should have introduced myself, tried to
exchange contact information, and passed on an invitation to get
together at La Belle Ăpoque. It was my last chance to do that.
As for the people with whom I was closest during the strikeâpartners in
the street, fellow writers of timely propaganda, and other
co-conspiratorsâthese were the people with whom I should have been
discussing what would come after the strike. What did our experiences
together during those months mean? As the larger movement fell apart,
could that history of working together transform into something else?
But relationships between specific people were not prioritized at the
end of the strike. Instead, we prioritized relationships to
massesâwhich, it turns out, are much more easily seduced by politicians
than by people like us.
It took a few months after the election for things to pick up againâbut
they did. Struggle in Montréal can cycle quickly from highs to lows and
back again. February of 2013 saw demonstrations first against the Salon
des Ressources Naturelles, a reprise of the previous yearâs Salon Plan
Nord, then a major mobilization to oppose the PQâs Summit on Higher
Education, at which the new governing party confirmed that, rather than
freezing tuition, they would index it to inflation and the cost of
living. This was not a broken promise on their part; it had been part of
their election platform.
The next month started off promisingly, with the night demonstration on
Tuesday, March 5, getting a little rowdy near the Palais des congrĂšs.
Yet that was the end of this second cycle. On March 12, another night
demonstrationâalbeit much smallerâwas crushed before it even left Berri
Square. On March 15, the SPVM, with the assistance of the SQ, crushed
MontrĂ©alâs annual anti-police demonstration decisively. From that point
on, all but one of the unpermitted demonstrations[14] that marched
through downtown during the spring of 2013 were kettled and dispersed
before they could become disruptive.
On the municipal, the provincial, and the federal level, the state has
taken measures to prevent any reprise of spring 2012, passing laws to
restrict or criminalize the essential elements of militant protest. The
most ominous of these measures is Bill Câ309, which finally became law
on June 19, 2013. Applicable across the entire territory of the Canadian
federation, it gives courts the ability to issue a prison sentence of up
to ten years if a person is convicted of wearing a mask in the course of
criminal activity during a demonstration. The simple fact of being
present in an illegal demonstration can be considered criminal in
itself.
Of course, actual police tactics are ultimately more important than
codes and ordinances. The SPVM have evidently taken time to analyze the
events of last spring, identifying their errors, drawing lessons,
updating their old techniques, learning new ones, upgrading their
equipment, and training officers. The results are plain to see.
In QuĂ©bĂ©cois student politics, the reformist federations FĂUQ and FĂCQ
have seen their influence reduced significantly, whereas the more
radical ASSĂ (the kernel around which the now defunct CLASSE was formed)
has more student associations affiliated with it than ever before. This
is good for us, if only because ASSĂâs direct democracy creates spaces
in which it is harder to shut people upâand anarchists are precisely the
kind of people that social-democratic politicos usually want to silence.
At the same time, ASSĂ is now disorganized and largely dysfunctional.
The members who possessed revolutionary aspirations and the strategic
ideas to match have largely abandoned the organization. There is good
reason to think that, just as after the 2005 strike, it will take years
before the organization is once again capable of mounting an effective
challenge to the government. Whether or not anarchists choose to
participate in that struggle (and some surely will, even if others
donât), it shouldnât be taken for granted that the next social major
upheaval in Québec will arise from the student movement.
Indeed, in the wake of 2012âs uprising, we should reconsider the
strategies that have worked for us in the past. This is certainly true
for all those who, in one way or another, sought to defend âthe QuĂ©bec
modelâ over the course of the strike: the most significant student
strike in QuĂ©becâs history, by just about any measure, didnât even
realize its most basic demand. For anarchists fighting in this
provinceâand anyone else who would willfully jeopardize the comforts of
welfare capitalism for half a chance at revolution and real freedomâit
is incumbent upon us to determine how we should proceed towards our
objectives, or live our politics, or both, in what is now a very
uncertain political environment.
I will conclude with just a few concrete suggestions. First off, however
we pursue our struggles in the future, we should strive to build more
infrastructure, more formal communications networks, and more informal
social networks that are autonomous of movements comprised largely of
people with whom we have serious political differences. Doing this could
make it possible that, the next time a large portion of society is drawn
into the streets, we will be able to participate in the conflict without
losing sight of our own values, building momentum that is not dependent
on someone elseâs movement.
Once we have infrastructure and networks of our own, as many anarchists
in Montréal already do, we should be sure to use them. The thing that
distinguishes revolutionary infrastructure from subcultural
infrastructureâthat is, an anarchist social center from a DIY punk
spaceâis that, alongside its role as another space to live, socialize,
and make ends meet, it should also serve to encourage people to throw
themselves into anarchist struggle, and to spread the skills necessary
for that task.
The latter first.
There are many practical skills that some anarchists already have, and
others need to learn: digital self-defense, trauma support, tactics for
street action, proficiency in different languages, and so on. These are
all useful for specific situationsâbut we also need to be prepared for
general situations. We need to be able to recognize when momentum is
picking up, when we are at a peak of opportunity, when things are slowly
or rapidly coming to a halt, and what is strategic for anarchists to do
in each of these situations. Studying history, not just because it is
curious or inspiring but in order to identify patterns and apply
lessons, is essential if we hope to orient ourselves in the trajectory
of the next upheaval to come.
Finally, the next time we realize that total anarchist triumph is no
longer in the cards, we should consider the advantages of going out with
a bang.
Report: Convergence for the Rentrée
[1] While it does encourage us to think of the ways that power is
diffuse, not simply a top-down imposition that we suffer passively, the
identification of âsocietyâ as the enemy reveals a disturbing ignorance
as to what exactly the State forcibly disintegrated and reconstitutes
with the bonds of nationalism and the Spectacle. It is this same unknown
that palpably coalesces in the space of the riot and of struggle more
generally. Margaret Thatcherâs assertion that society does not exist,
only the Market, was less an observation than the mission statement of
capitalism.
[2] While it does encourage us to think of the ways that power is
diffuse, not simply a top-down imposition that we suffer passively, the
identification of âsocietyâ as the enemy reveals a disturbing ignorance
as to what exactly the State forcibly disintegrated and reconstitutes
with the bonds of nationalism and the Spectacle. It is this same unknown
that palpably coalesces in the space of the riot and of struggle more
generally. Margaret Thatcherâs assertion that society does not exist,
only the Market, was less an observation than the mission statement of
capitalism.
[3] A classic example of this would be the disastrous strategy of
collaboration with the republican government chosen by the CNT in July
1936, and their ability to suppress other strategic tendencies, such as
the illegalist tendency of some Italian and Catalan anarchist
expropriators in Barcelona, and the insurrectionary tendency of the
Friends of Durruti groupânot to mention the critical voice of Durruti
himself, before he was killed by the Stalinists. The anarchist space
throughout the Spanish state was far more heterogeneous and fragmented
before the Civil War than is generally recognized. Dozens of different
currents and tendencies were active, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in
harmony. When the FAI succeeded in its important mission of blocking the
syndicalist takeover of the CNT, around 1934, they also initiated the
unfortunate unification of the anarchist space within and under the CNT.
It is possible that this unification already bore rotten fruit in 1934,
when the anarchists failed to show effective solidarity with the
insurrection in Asturias, although it would take more reading to confirm
whether the CNTâs organizational hegemony hindered solidarity.
[4] Of course, its roots can be traced back further, as when
insurrectionary anarchists were expelled from or broke with spaces
controlled by anarcho-syndicalists (1996), were subsequently defeated by
repression in the space they had created for themselves (2003), and took
refuge in the space created by squatters or returned to resume a direct
engagement with the anarcho-syndicalists in the space of the CNT. This
interpenetration helped lay the groundwork for the subsequent shattering
of the previously segmented anarchist space.
[5] Those who, in my mind, have carried on the methods of the
antiglobalization movement without learning most of its critical
lessons.
[6] One might argue that a change in the physical content of labor has
made unions less relevant. But in the case of Barcelona, while factory
labor has clearly declined and the service industry blossomed, this does
not seem to provide a satisfying explanation. In the â20s and â30s, two
of the largest (and most radical) sectors in the CNT, as well as two of
the largest trades on an absolute scale, were the wood workersâ and
bricklayersâ unions. The workers in those unions were (un)employed
overwhelmingly by the construction industry, which was far more
precarious and short-term than factory work. Construction work tended to
be given out on a per job basis. It did not generate either the sense of
neighborhood or the relatively stable collective relationships that the
factories did. And for the dispossessed peasants who made up the ranks
of those unions, the new forms of mass construction hardly constituted
skilled labor. In other words, work in the construction industry a
hundred years ago was not so different from work in the service industry
today, an industry that employs the vast majority of Barcelonaâs
underemployed anarchists. Yet those anarchists do not have a union. I
would argue, in very unmaterialist terms, that the key shift has been
cultural. The proletarian identity has been eroded and replaced by a
democratic identity, aided by the strategic extension of commodities
into the lives of the poor, and by the even more strategic
universalization of bourgeois culture through television. In fact, it
was probably the survival of strong feudal characteristics in Spanish
society, and not the reality of factory labor, that enabled the
exploited to identify so clearly as proletarian when they came to the
city a hundred years ago. Although the unseen purpose of their wage
labor was to unify them with their bosses, they transposed the
peasant/lord division from the countryside to the apparently similar but
essentially different inequality they found in the city.
[7] By âWestern medicine,â we should not understand every European
tradition of healing, but the proactively patriarchal and capitalist
practice of medicine that was institutionalized in the Enlightenment and
subsequently globalized.
[8] Given the worldwide recession that forms the backdrop of todayâs
social struggles, this formulation only deals with the possibility of
economic crisis. But struggling in times of social peace can also
provoke a crisis in governance that is not directly caused by economic
recession, as in the rebellions of 1968.
[9] Of course, upheavals are unpredictable. In Montréal and elsewhere,
we have seen that whenever the police kill someone, it can spark riots.
These sorts of upheavals are often led only by marginalized youthâand
all too often, as with the riots that started in the London neighborhood
of Tottenham in 2011, anarchists fail to contribute in any meaningful
way.
[10] The problem of strategy in chess is the problem of determining the
best way to checkmate your opponent. The problem of strategy for
anarchists is more complicated, because we donât necessarily agree as to
what we are trying to achieveâbut there are a few things we should be
able to agree upon, such as abolishing police, prisons, and borders.
Whatever our goals, strategy is how we attempt to reach them. Speaking
of a correct analysis, then, has little do with a lofty concept like
Truth, which is supposedly final. No analysis is correct forever; no
analysis is correct outside the context in which it serves. For
anarchists, who wish to bring about a revolution, a correct analysis is
simply whatever interpretation of social reality best informs our
efforts to achieve that objective.
[11] There were Québécois manifestations of Occupy, including Occupy
MontrĂ©al, but they didnât arouse nearly as much interest as the movement
did south of the border and elsewhere in Canada. Even more importantly,
they never put much effort into making themselves relevant by developing
a street presenceâeven a pacifist one.
[12] There were many peopleâincluding anarchists, but also others,
particularly anarchism-skeptical feministsâwho pushed to change the
discourse of the student movement from within its formal structures,
such as cégep associations, CLASSE congresses and committees, and formal
and informal departmental associations at universities. The aim was
often to see the struggles of women, queer people, and people of color
mentioned in demonstration callouts and public statements. As a result
of their efforts, the analysis presented in the manifesto that CLASSE
released during the summer, Share Our Future, was less terrible than it
might have been. Yet improved rhetoric never translated into meaningful
action on the part of CLASSE in solidarity with indigenous people,
MontrĂ©alâs racialized youth, or any other marginalized category of
people besides pro-strike students in Québec.
[13] One exception is CLAC, which did make the conscious decision to
organize demonstrations during the strike, and thereby did more than
simply produce propaganda. CLACâs politics arenât explicitly anarchist,
but anarchist ideas and principles are hegemonic within the
organization.
[14] The âStatus for Allâ demonstration on May 18, 2013, which was
chiefly organized by the migrant justice organization Solidarity Across
Borders, is the single exception.