![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/01/2.jpg\")
A picture is worth a thousand words: a burning “Cybertruck” marketed by fascist billionaire Elon Musk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas.
\nIt’s time to take stock of the year have just lived through and get oriented for the year ahead. Here, we review the events of 2024 and our own contributions to the fight for a better world.
\n\nA year that began amid genocide in Palestine and war in Ukraine and Sudan is concluding as Donald Trump prepares to return to power. This has grim implications in the United States, where Trump has explicitly promised to carry out “the largest mass deportations in US history,” but also elsewhere, as Trump may attempt to seize new territory, permit Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to resume invading Syria in order to carry out ethnic cleansing, and make deals with other fellow autocrats at everyone else’s expense.
\n\nFrom this vantage point, we can see that we have been living through the rise of a new reactionary nationalism that is now positioned to supplant neoliberalism as the dominant political paradigm. It has been gaining power almost everywhere—from Russia to Italy and Germany, from Brazil to Indonesia. It is clear now that the Biden era did not interrupt the rise of autocracy, but simply represented a stage of its rise, during which liberals demonstrated that they, too, were eager to militarize the police, fund genocide, and normalize extrajudicial violence—even if that meant preparing the way for an authoritarian regime that will do away with democracy as they knew it.
\n\nFor decades now, we have been fighting on two fronts against neoliberalism and fascism. These are challenging conditions: winning a battle is no guarantee that we will not have to fight that battle again and again, and every time we lose a battle, we are forced to fight it once more, but on worse terms. That makes it all the more important that the ways that we fight demonstrate our values and reflect the sort of life we consider worth living.
\n\nAs 2025 begins with an explosion in Las Vegas and an attack in New Orleans, it looks like we are in for a bloody period. As we have already seen in Trump’s aggrandizement of various murderers and, on the other side of the battle lines, in the support for Luigi Mangione, this era is shaping up to be a clash between different kinds of violence. It is not the future we would have chosen, but the story is not over and there may be better days yet to come.
\n\nThis year, the challenge will be to fight as hard as we have to in order to defend ourselves and our communities while nourishing the parts of ourselves that are imaginative, that are tender, that can not only desire a better world but believe it into being. We will have to do these things in the midst of turmoil, rather than waiting for more peaceful times. We can do this.
\n\nHappy new year, dear comrades.
\n\nFootage from an anarchist demonstration outside a jail on New Year’s Eve, 2024.
\nThe militarization of the police continued throughout the Biden era, creating the conditions for Trump and his supporters to ratchet up state violence even further. Seeking to document the proliferation of “cop city” police militarization projects, we published an incomplete list of such projects around the country, along with a report from a protest against one of them in Lacey, Washington.
\n\nNot surprisingly, the rate at which police murder people has also continued to increase. When police in New York City attacked a person they accused of dodging the fare on the subway—opening fire, shooting the suspect, a police officer, and multiple other people who happened to be in the station—we reported on a collective fare strike action that people organized in response.
\n\nFinally, in a massive history and analysis, we explored the history of the Stop the Sweeps campaign in Austin, Texas, aiming to distill lessons about autonomous organization to aid revolutionaries elsewhere in future struggles against police violence and dispossession.
\n\n A picture is worth a thousand words: a burning “Cybertruck” marketed by fascist billionaire Elon Musk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas.
\nThe floods of May 2024 inflicted the most damage of any climate event in Brazilian history. Similar catastrophes occurred in Spain and elsewhere around the world. We circulated reports from anarchists who responded to these disasters, including anarchists in Appalachia who experienced Hurricane Helene.
\n\nPanning back to show these events in context, we published an article by Peter Gelderloos exploring why the strategies that mainstream environmental movements are employing to halt industrially-produced climate change are intended to fail.
\n\nFinally, we designed two posters—”Capitalism Is the Dance of Death” and “Capitalism Thrives on Death.” We mass-produced a sticker version of the former.
\n\nThroughout 2024, the Israeli government continued its project of carrying out a genocide in Gaza to make way for its colonial ambitions. We have published several perspectives from people in the region making the case for an anti-colonial understanding of the situation and exploring what it means to act in solidarity\n with Palestinians.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/03/9.jpg\")
\nWhen students at Columbia University and Barnard College set up an encampment in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide at the hands of the Israeli military, we immediately circulated coverage from within the movement, as well as a thorough history of the campus occupation movement of 2008-2010.
\n\nWe did the same thing when students at Cal Poly Humboldt campus occupied a building in solidarity, precipitating a showdown with police from throughout the region that raised the bar for campus occupations with a bonk heard round the world, a bonk for the ages.
\n\nAs the Gaza solidarity movement established campus occupations around the country, we documented them—from the University of Texas at Austin to the the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and as far away as Mexico City.
\n\nSpeaking of Austin, we also published a guide to running an announcements-only Signal thread based on the experience of organizers in Austin.
\n\nIn “Why the State Can’t Compromise with the Gaza Solidarity Movement,” we explored the strategic questions that emerged in the course of the occupations—questions that still face us today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/05/05/3.jpg\")
A banner seen at a Gaza solidarity encampment in Mexico City, featuring the titular character from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella, The Little Prince. The text reads “Until that which is essential becomes visible.”
\nOn May 2, the editorial collective of the Wall Street Journal published a hit piece implying that our publishing project was behind the Gaza solidarity encampments across the United States. The New York Post followed suit the next day, copying the homework of their brighter and more industrious classmates.
\n\nNot much brighter, mind you.
\n\nTo hear the Wall Street Journal tell it, you would think we were the ones pulling the strings behind the entire solidarity movement. But remember, Columbia University is a walled fortress. Security guards check the IDs of every single person who comes in and out. The only people who could initiate any kind of solidarity movement at Columbia were Columbia students and faculty, and that is exactly what happened.
\n\nWe publish reports from participants in movements like the one that broke out at Columbia, but we are not the ones radicalizing them. The violence in Gaza started that process—and the police did the rest. Capitalist genocide enthusiasts have only themselves to blame for the pushback that they are experiencing.
\n\nWe used to consider the Wall Street Journal to offer reliable journalism. Morally, of course, they were completely bankrupt—their whole project is to justify the tremendous disparities in wealth and power that capitalism produces. But if your raison d’être is to advise capitalists regarding their decisions in the market, you generally have to stick close to the facts, lest you give bad investment advice.
\n\nNot so anymore, apparently. This time, they intentionally misrepresented the situation, bending the truth in order to drum up outrage and fear according to the format set by Fox News and even worse outlets. And this was not some rogue columnist, but the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal itself. This represents the best they are capable of, the highest priorities of the paper and its owners.
\n\nTheir coverage functioned as an offensive operation on the terrain of discourse, truth be damned, intended to discredit student protesters and make a target out of anarchists in general. The explicit death threats that the troglodytes who read their coverage sent us were an inevitable and presumably intentional consequence.
\n\nIn any case, they will do nothing to discourage us from playing our part in resisting genocide. On the contrary.
\n\nIn response to simplistic readings of the situation in the Mideast, we published a statement by Iranian exiles arguing for a consistent opposition to the Iranian government as well as the Israeli government and all the other forces complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.
\n\nWe also published a text about how Kurdish protesters in Turkey succeeded in preventing the autocratic Turkish government from annulling the municipal elections of March 31 in order to install its own representatives in positions of authority.
\n\nWhen the Syrian revolution finally got underway again, we presented perspectives from participants in the revolution in western Syria alongside a report from anarchists in Rojava, the northeastern region of Syria.
\n\nFinally, we published the reflections of a Russian anarchist volunteer in northeastern Syria. He described watching the Russian mercenaries exit the country after inflicting years of atrocities—hoping that one day, he might see the same soldiers lay down their arms in his homeland, too. Amid widespread suffering and peril, his anecdote represents a glimmer of hope. History cannot remain frozen forever—and all tyrants eventually fall.
\n\nIn the background of all of these events, the buildup to the 2024 elections was like a ticking time bomb. For those who were paying attention, it was clear that the Republicans were likely to win. In a time when increasing disparities in political and economic power are driving many voters to seek a strongman to represent them, the Democrats doubled down on presenting themselves as the party of the status quo, permitting their own ossified bureaucracy to throw the election to their rivals. We identified this problem in July.
\n\nYet some were still surprised on the night of November 5. The truth is, the Democrats are responsible in many ways for the problems we face today, and no half measures can avail us in this situation.
\n\nAt the same time, the return of Trump will only intensify the crises we face. We immediately set out to mobilize in response, calling on people around the country to host assemblies and festivals of resistance in order to create the kind of connections that people will need to protect each other. As we see it, based on the experiences of the previous Trump era, resistance is our only hope to put a limit on how far this slide into authoritarianism can go.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/10.jpg\")
\nSimilar struggles are coming to a head all around the world, now.
\n\nFor example, for several years, locals and environmentalists have fought against the Tesla “gigafactory” outside Berlin—the biggest factory producing electric cars for Tesla in all of Europe. In March, we published an interview with a participant in a forest occupation blocking the expansion of the factory, alongside a translation of a communiqué by a clandestine anarchist group that carried out an act of sabotage that shut down the Tesla factory for at least a week, costing the company hundreds of millions of euros.
\n\nAs Elon Musk expresses his commitment to outright fascist politics more and more explicitly, forms of resistance are especially inspiring.
\n\nOur correspondent in Argentina sent us a report on the opening of the reign of Javier Milei, titled “Six Months in a Neoliberal Dystopia”—a vivid picture of the rival forces and visions contending for the future everywhere.
\n\nIn August 2024, a wave of protests rocked Indonesia in response to political machinations aimed at anointing a successor to President Joko Widodo. We interviewed anarchist participants in different parts of Indonesia.
\n\nElsewhere, in Georgia, a protest movement erupted against the government’s shift towards Putin’s authoritarian regime and the grip of foreign economic powers upon the Caucasus in general. We published a report from the streets and an analysis of the causes and stakes of the protests.
\n\nWe didn’t spend 2024 just reporting on social struggles and analyzing geopolitical conflicts. We also published more thoughtful, personal texts, such as this meditation on love for Valentine’s Day and this personal narrative from the front lines of the opioid epidemic.
\n\nFor Steal Something from Work Day, we agitated in support of workers with sticky fingers, arguing that workplace theft should be understood as the most widely practiced form of wealth redistribution in our time:
\n\n\n\n\nThe United States Department of Commerce estimates that every year, “businesses lose $50 billion as a result of employee theft.” Let’s zoom in on that word, “lose.” They aren’t saying that $50 billion just disappears; it isn’t simply mislaid, nor willfully destroyed. They mean that $50 billion ends up in the pockets of the workers, rather than in the bank accounts of corporate executives. In other words, the problem is that the money ends up in the hands of the people who are doing the work that produces it.
\n
For April Fool’s Day, we published an extended rendering of the old CrimethInc. lightbulb joke. In a further ironic development, this text was earnestly translated into Spanish and Basque by a comrade in Basque Country who was not familiar with the concept of April Fool’s Day.
\n\n\n\n\n“How many anarchists does it take to change a light bulb?” I asked.
\n\n“We’re not here to change things for people,” said the insurrectionist. “The light bulb has to change itself.”
\n\n“‘Communism is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality has to adjust itself,’” quoted the communist. “It is ‘the real movement that abolishes the present state of things,’ which is to say, the darkness.”
\n\n“So if we change the light bulb, it was communism that did it?” objected the insurrectionist. “Talk about gaslighting.”
\n\n“Lenin says ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrocution of the whole country,’” the communist answered.
\n
This year, we completed our documentary about the 2019 uprising in Chile, “Fell in Love with Fire.”
\n\nFollowing up our earlier coverage of the Chilean uprising, this film offers an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt.
\n\nIn addition, we published footage of a play that the Weelaunee Solidarity Collective performed at the Zapatista encuentro in January, supplementing accounts of the journey to the encuentro and the gathering itself.
\n\nWe also produced a video walkthrough to accompany our guide, “How to Host a Haunted House.”
\n\nTo celebrate the back-to-back birthdays of Louise Michel and Mikhail Bakunin, we published a narrative account of Michel’s exile in New Caledonia, followed by a virtual tour of Bakunin’s birthplace and family home, Priamukhino, including the museum documenting his life and the lives of his relatives and friends.
\n\nRevisiting queer resistance to the Nazis in search of tactics and inspiration for our own times, we published “Queer Wanderings through the Other Germany and the Anti-Nazi Underworld.”
\n\nTo pass on the memory of more recent historical events, we published retrospectives on Reclaim the Streets, Occupy Wall Street, and the anarchist resistance to the fascist gathering in Charlottesville in 2017.
\n\nIn order to enable our slain comrades to continue to address the living, we published the diary of Dmitry Petrov, in which he offered an eyewitness account of the revolution of 2014 in Ukraine. We also contributed an introduction for a book documenting the life and times of Aleksei Sutuga, a Siberian anti-fascist who passed away in 2020.
\n\nOn February 6, 2024, the billionaire Sebastián Piñera perished in a helicopter crash. Considering how many Chilean radicals met their deaths from helicopters during the dictatorship, Piñera’s death hangs in history as an unsurpassable example of poetic justice.
\n\nAt the end of February, we received an email from a person who signed himself Aaron Bushnell. He had written us to explain his reasons for setting himself on fire at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. In communication with his friends, we published their memories of him. He seems in all regards to have been an exemplary individual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/02/30/3.jpg\")
Aaron Bushnell.
\nTragically, the anarchist Luciano Pitronello, also known as Tortuga, who had cheated death in 2011, passed away as the consequence of a workplace accident in August. We published a eulogy in his memory.
\n\nThis year, we have published material in Arabic, Basque, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese, among other languages. As of now, we have over 200 articles available on our site in Spanish and Italian, and over 100 in German, French, and Portuguese. For a full listing of all the material we have published in languages other than English, you can start here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/01/23/16.jpg\")
\nIn addition, we work with people around the world to keep our works available in print in other languages and regions, as well. For example, this year, our comrades in Brazil did new print runs of three of our books in Portuguese: Recipes for Disaster, Expect Resistance, and Days of War, Nights of Love.
\n\nWe take internationalism and the project of building bridges between different communities and struggles very seriously. It is an honor to work with and learn from our comrades all around the world. If we can build vibrant connections and circulate new ideas and tactics as they emerge, we may prove more resilient than the global capitalist order that has created so many challenges for itself as well as for us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/07/11/3.jpg\")
Stormy seas ahead.
\nAll of the following releases are available in our tools section. Please print and circulate them yourself!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/01/1.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the sticker.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/24/1.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/23/1.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster. This is also available as a sticker.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/strategizing-for-palestinian-solidarity/strategizing-for-palestinian-solidarity_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the zine.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/dont-stop-continuing-the-fight-against-cop-city/dont-stop-continuing-the-fight-against-cop-city_front.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/memories-of-aaron-bushnell-1998-2024/memories-of-aaron-bushnell-1998-2024_front.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/this-is-about-stopping-the-genocide-in-palestine/this-is-about-stopping-the-genocide-in-palestine_front.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/from-redwood-trees-the-view-of-a-new-world-being-born/from-redwood-trees-the-view-of-a-new-world-being-born_front.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/defending-the-camp/defending-the-camp_front.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/why-the-state-cant-compromise-with-the-gaza-solidarity-movement/why-the-state-cant-compromise-with-the-gaza-solidarity-movement_front.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/not-an-unexpected-death-an-account-from-the-opioid-epidemic/not-an-unexpected-death-an-account-from-the-opioid-epidemic_front.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/the-sunbird/the-sunbird_front.jpg\")
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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/ya-ghazze-habibti-gaza-my-love-understanding-the-genocide-in-palestine/ya-ghazze-habibti-gaza-my-love-understanding-the-genocide-in-palestine_front.jpg\")
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\nIn the following analysis, we explore the responses to two different extrajudicial killings as a way to understand the different forms of violence that are coming to the fore in our society right now. In the appendix, we offer an incomplete roundup of various responses to the shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
\n\nEvery day, something like fifty people are shot and killed in the United States. On December 4, 2024, one of them was Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the most profitable health insurance corporation in the country. In the weeks since, we’ve all heard a great deal more about that particular CEO than about any of the hundreds of other people killed by gunfire this month. At the same time, there has been an outpouring of support for the attack, despite the efforts of media platforms and employers to suppress it.
\n\nOn December 13, president-elect Donald Trump and vice-president-elect JD Vance invited Daniel Penny to join them at the Army/Navy football game—solely on account of his having senselessly murdered a Black person and been acquitted.1 Here, we see some of the most powerful political figures in the world attempting to drum up enthusiasm for extrajudicial killings—provided that they target the marginalized.
\n\nWe must understand the popular response to the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in the context of a society in which life is increasingly cheap. After the far right lionized George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse; after millions participated in a countrywide uprising demanding that police stop killing Black and brown people, only to see politicians across the political spectrum double down on supporting police, with the consequence that police have continued to murder people at a steadily accelerating pace; after bipartisan support for the genocide in Gaza; after hundreds of school shootings, hundreds of thousands of opioid overdoses, and millions of COVID-19 fatalities, not to mention the countless avoidable deaths resulting from the for-profit health and insurance industries—is it really so startling that one person took a shot at an executive? What is startling is that in nearly every other case, the killers have targeted those less powerful than themselves.
\n\nTrump’s decision to host Daniel Penny is a literalistic fulfillment of Frank Wilhoit’s dictum that “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” By contrast, the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO suggests that the law cannot always protect the in-groups from the out-groups.
\n\nBut this is not just a question of violence aimed down the social hierarchy versus violence aimed up it. We are talking about two entirely different kinds of violence. Let’s call them sacrificial violence and retribution.
\n\nWhat is sacrificial violence?
\n\nAccording to René Girard, writing in Violence and the Sacred,
\n\n\n\n\nWhen unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.
\n
Girard is part of a long tradition of European anthropologists whose speculations boil down to a series of just-so stories about humanity.2 But we don’t have to buy into his entire framework to recognize what he is speaking about here:
\n\n\n\n\nThe sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.
\n
Sacrificial violence, in short, is scapegoating carried through to the point of murder, functioning as a ritualized means of preserving a society in which there are tremendous unresolved internal tensions.
\n\n\n\n\nIf left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into “proper” channels.
\n
And who makes for an ideal scapegoat?
\n\n\n\n\nAll our sacrificial victims […] are invariably distinguishable from the nonsacrificeable beings by one essential characteristic: between these victims and the community a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an act of vengeance. The considerable importance this freedom from reprisal has for the sacrificial process makes us understand that sacrifice is primarily an act of violence without risk of vengeance.
\n
This equation explains why ordinary bigots seek their targets among the most marginalized—those no one will avenge. But Girard’s framework goes further, showing how this can help to protect the state in times of crisis.
\n\nPerhaps this explains why Trump was able to win the 2024 election by promising to carry out gratuitous violence against undocumented people and trans people. Carrying out “the largest deportation operation in American history,” as Trump has explicitly pledged to do, will wreck the US economy. It will deliver no material gains to the vast majority of his supporters, who benefit from the underpaid labor of the undocumented and the resulting cheapness of commodities. From a purely economic perspective, exploiting the labor of the undocumented inside the borders of the United States provides more advantages to Trump’s supporters than deporting them ever could. By any measure, it’s a waste of resources: deporting a million people in one year will cost eighteen times more than the entire world spends annually on cancer research.
\n\nIn other words, mass deportations are a costly luxury indulgence that Trump’s supporters regard as worth the expense because they experience the need for violence so intensely.
\n\nThe same goes for the desire to see violence enacted—both judicially and extrajudicially—against trans people and against women as a whole. The mendacious propaganda falsely claiming that trans people are carrying out mass shootings or that undocumented immigrants are contributing to a crime wave is not received by its intended audience as cool-headed statistical inquiry, but rather as an indulgence of their desire to do violence to the truth itself as a step towards doing violence to those that they imagine can be harmed “without fear of reprisal.” They have not been misled by erroneous reporting; their desire for violence has created a market for falsehoods.
\n\nAs we argued during the first Trump administration, Trump did not become popular by promising to redistribute wealth, but by promising to redistribute violence. This redistribution of violence creates a pressure valve for a whole host of resentments. To quote Girard, once more:
\n\n\n\n\nThe desire to commit an act of violence on those near us cannot be suppressed without a conflict; we must divert that impulse, therefore, toward the sacrificial victim, the creature we can strike down without fear of reprisal, since he lacks a champion.
\n
Why are societies driven to desire sacrificial violence in the first place? If it is true that sacrificial violence serves to channel rage away from those who provoke it, then we can infer that the more injustice there is in a society—the more that people are oppressed and exploited and humiliated by those who have more power and more privilege than they do—the stronger the urge for sacrificial violence will be.3
\n\nThis brings us back to Trump’s decision to fête Daniel Penny. In a time when there is increasingly widespread anger, the role that sacrificial violence plays channeling violence away from those who are responsible for harm is essential for maintaining the stability of the prevailing order. This is the world of The Hunger Games, become real.
\n\nWhat would all these angry people be doing if their rage was not satiated via violence against those more vulnerable than themselves?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/5.jpg\")
A banner seen hanging in Chicago over Lake Shore Drive on December 9, 2024.
\nRetribution is fundamentally different from sacrificial violence. For its target, it seeks the person who is most responsible for a particular injustice, regardless of where that person is situated in the social hierarchy.
\n\nAs a general rule, those who are most responsible for injustice are usually among those who possess the most power—otherwise, how would they have the opportunity to do so much harm? The average person in the United States has considerably more to fear from corporate executives than from undocumented immigrants.
\n\nIt is the powerful who are able to pose the greatest threat to others: this is practically self-evident, despite the efforts of billionaire-owned media and social media platforms to humanize the wealthy and dehumanize the poor.
\n\nWhen we see people fixating their rage on the powerless amid the worst inequality in generations, this is a dead giveaway that they have been hoodwinked. It is telling that the populist movement around the wealthiest man to ever become president of the United States is presented as a “revolt against the elites” even as it rallies people to worship oligarchs like Trump and Elon Musk. There is no longer any way to rally people without at least pretending to have a go at some subset of the ruling class.
\n\nIt is terrifying to realize that one’s enemies are considerably more powerful than oneself. It is much easier to take out one’s misfortunes on those who are even worse off. Easier—and utterly pointless—and despicably cowardly.
\n\nThe shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare galvanized such a powerful response because it posed the question very clearly: should violence be enacted against the most vulnerable—or against the most responsible? It spoke to millions of people because, across the political spectrum, all of them understood that insurance profiteers are responsible for their suffering or for the suffering of people they empathize with. Precisely because it was legible as retribution, the shooting illuminated that injustice has been taking place on a mass scale.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/10.jpg\")
Commenters on Youtube discussing their feelings about the shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
\nGirard cautions us against vengeance, arguing that a single act of retribution can set off a chain reaction:
\n\n\n\n\nVengeance, then, is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove fatal… The multiplication of reprisals instantaneously puts the very existence of a society in jeopardy.
\n
It would put the very existence of this society in jeopardy, at least. Of course, a society in which capitalists are able to amass billions by ruthlessly exploiting everyone else—a society that can only remain stable by targeting more and more people for sacrificial violence—already involves a certain amount of jeopardy.
\n\nIndeed, what the capitalists fear most is that this single act of vengeance might come to involve the whole social body, that it could initiate a chain reaction. This is why Luigi Mangione, the person accused of shooting the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, is being charged with the same crime on both state and federal levels, and with terrorism besides.
\n\nIs Girard right about the risks of vengeance? We can grant that many people hold sincere but erroneous beliefs about who is responsible for their suffering, quite apart from the inclination towards sacrificial violence that the powerful seek to foster for their own protection. But is it better to inhabit a society in which the powerful can inflict any amount of death and suffering on the powerless without fear of consequences, up to and including outright genocide? Is that really the best way to protect society?
\n\nWe can also grant that it is far better to resolve conflicts to the satisfaction of all parties than it is to descend into interminable blood feuds.4 But the state does not actually exist to resolve conflicts. The judicial apparatus and the hundreds of thousands of police who serve it exist to ensure that conflicts need not be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. They exist to force unsatisfactory outcomes on people, almost always to the advantage of the wealthy—thereby perpetuating the conditions that stoke the desire for sacrificial violence.
\n\nIf Girard is indeed correct that sacrificial violence is always directed against those who can be “exposed to violence without fear of reprisal,” then it stands to reason that retribution is the only way to hold it at bay once it is unleashed.
\n\nOpposing retribution and accepting sacrificial violence in its place will not serve to avert bloodshed; it can only function to ensure that bloodletting will not threaten the social order. Today, the vast majority of us are closer to being among those who can be killed “without fear of reprisal” than we are to becoming executives whose deaths will be mourned on nationwide media—and the less we act in solidarity with each other, the truer that will be. If we do not wish to risk one day being subject to sacrificial violence ourselves, we must become capable of forging common cause with those who are worse off than us in order to defend ourselves from those who seek to exploit and oppress us.
\n\nIn the absence of effective collective models for self-defense and social change, retribution hangs in the popular imagination as the only remaining way to take a stand against injustice. Sacrificial violence corrupts and debases all who derive relief from it; by contrast, retribution at least expresses a forlorn longing for a world without injustice. As Girard himself admits,
\n\n\n\n\nIt is precisely because they detest violence that men make a duty of vengeance.
\n
In the iconography of sacrificial violence and retribution, the scapegoat and the martyr are twin archetypes. The former is sacrificed to stabilize the existing order, the latter serves to sanctify a new order by giving his life for it. By sacrificing himself, the martyr demonstrates that the new order has a transcendent value—that it is worth more than life itself. These archetypes are thousands of years old; their influence on us is deeper than we understand.
\n\nOf course, most people are only drawn to martyrdom as a spectator sport. Martyrs’ sacrifices often prove most useful to those who have no intention of risking their own lives for any cause. The popular response to the shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare shows how disillusioned millions of people are with capitalism and its beneficiaries, but this response is also a symptom of widespread despair and demobilization. The shooting aroused such an outpouring of pent-up frustrations precisely because these people have not been able to figure out what they themselves can do to put a stop to injustice and exploitation.
\n\nIt is up to us to show that there are ways to resist injustice and exploitation that do not end in martyrdom. If we do not popularize collective models for bringing about social change, if we leave people to choose between passivity and martyrdom, the vast majority will choose passivity.
\n\nThose who approve of neither sacrificial violence nor retribution had better demonstrate an effective alternative. Arguing against retribution without doing anything to change the conditions that provoke it can only set the stage for even more sacrificial violence to occur in its place.
\n\nMake no mistake, as economic and ecological crises intensify, we are going to see more and more sacrificial violence—and more public figures will come to view it as necessary, even if they dare not call it by its name. Trump’s violent rhetoric is not a temporary excess; it is just the most visible manifestation of a mechanism that has already resumed the essential role that it plays in stabilizing the social order during every era of unrest.5
\n\nAs anarchists, the spiritual economics of guilt and punishment that underlies the framework of retribution is foreign to us. Calculating culpability and meting out suffering is the work of the state, its judiciary, and its God; we have other ambitions. We do not wish to see the guilty punished as an end unto itself—we seek to do away with the means via which they oppress. We would pass up the fulfillment of any vendetta if we could thereby bring about the abolition of capitalism, even if that meant permitting every former billionaire to walk free. We don’t seek to goad others into becoming martyrs on our behalf. We aspire to model the sort of courage, humility, and care we hope that others will express alongside us so that together we can change the world.
\n\nBut until we succeed, there will be sacrificial violence—and retribution.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/2.jpg\")
Graffiti seen in Seattle, Washington.
\nAccording to a survey, over 40% of young people polled deemed the assassination of Thompson “acceptable.” Photographs of graffiti, banner drops, and altered billboards expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person currently being charged with the killing of the CEO, have gone viral and generated headlines. The December 4th Legal Committee is helping to run a fundraising campaign in support of Mangione’s legal defense; interviews with spokespersons Sam Beard and Jamie Peck have been featured on outlets such as CNN, drawing hundreds of supportive comments. As of this writing, the online fundraiser has raised over $186,000.
\n\nHere follows an incomplete roundup of graffiti, posters, corporate media interviews, and demonstrations addressing the shooting of Brian Thompson or expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person accused of carrying it out.
\n\nSam Beard speaking on CNN on behalf of a fundraising campaign in support of Luigi Mangione’s legal defense.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/3.jpg\")
A poster seen in Portland, Oregon.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/4.jpg\")
Graffiti on a freeway in Medford, OR
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/1.jpg\")
Freight train graffiti photographed in the Bay Area.
\n\n\n\nToday, six Luigis took a couple banners to a highly trafficked foot bridge in downtown Austin and danced to the Mario theme song. Pedestrians cheered, wrote letters to Luigi, and even took photos with the banners. Letters ranged from heart-wrenching stories about family members being denied healthcare to love letters. The overall reception was extremely good. Flyers were handed out that called out the largest health insurance company in Texas, Blue Cross Blue Shield. They read:
\n\n“On December 4th, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down. The bullet casings told the story: this was act of vengeance against UnitedHealthCare, who denies over 30% of health insurance claims—a company emblematic of a system that kills. Every year, over 50,000 Americans die from lack of insurance. 38% percent of us avoid necessary care because we’re scared of the cost. One in twelve is drowning in medical debt. Health insurance companies aren’t doctors. They don’t heal—they profit by restricting access to care. While we ration medications, delay appointments, and worry about bills, they rake in billions. We get sicker and they get richer. This violence isn’t on the evening news. It’s buried beneath their marketing, their endless paperwork, their fine print. But make no mistake: this is violence. And they’re laughing all the way to the bank. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Texas’s largest insurer, denies one in five claims while pocketing $18 billion in revenue. Whether Thompson’s death filled you with joy or horror, it ripped the mask off. The truth was laid bare: these companies are complicit in widespread suffering. Think about the last time you or someone you love worried about a medical bill. Put off care because of the cost. Cut pills in half to make them last. You’ve felt the violence they inflict. Now, the media and government scramble to spin the narrative, calling working-class mother Briana Boston a “terrorist” for uttering “Deny, Defend, Depose” when her claims were denied. We must remain clear headed: a small group gets rich off our illness. The solution is just as simple: abolish these corporations and nationalize health insurance. Single-payer healthcare works everywhere else in the developed world, where people live longer and healthier lives. Texans, by contrast, die three years younger, victims of private healthcare. The only question left is this: When will we stop waiting and take what is ours?”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/9.jpg\")
Austin, December 21.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/6.jpg\")
Graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.
\nIn addition, a rally in occurred Indianapolis, Indiana. From a report:
\n\n\n\n\nToday, we protest against Elevance Health not in its role as a distinct actor in the health insurance market, a single agent in the hall of mirrors of contemporary capitalism. Elevance operates in just the same manner as UHC in the way it ranks bodies and judges some to be worthy of care and the rest simply not worth the time or effort. In this manner, the only difference between the two is a matter of degrees in subdomains. We believe it is necessary to oppose this system of broad ranking of life expectancies in an age of depreciating life expectations. It is necessary as a precondition to a life worth living. We believe that everyone is worthy of care. We believe that everyone deserves access to a healthy life according to their own standards. Both Elevance and UHC stand as barriers to this possibility. This is why we oppose them.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/8.jpg\")
Graffiti seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
\n\n\n\n“You know the theme of the event tonight is the roaring ’20s. In the roaring ’20s, there was a lot of wealth and inequality, just like now. So while they’re drinking champagne and thinking about glamor, we’re thinking about the people that we love who are poor, who are sick, and who can’t afford healthcare.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/23/7.jpg\")
Artwork in Santiago, Chile.
\nWhen they invited him to the football game, Penny had just appeared on Fox News describing the “guilt” he “would have felt if someone did get hurt”—making it explicitly clear that he did not consider Jordan Neely to count as a human being. ↩
\nFor example, Girard argues that desire emerges imitatively and that this inevitably provokes violent tensions between people, as it causes them to compete for the same scarce objects. One might counter that while some of the things that people desire are indeed subject to scarcity, imitative desire could also give rise to cooperation, producing abundance in place of scarcity and diminishing the impetus towards violence, sacrificial or otherwise. In short, Girard does a compelling job of describing the role of sacrificial violence in afflicted societies, but he does not succeed in proving that it is inevitable. ↩
\nThis explains why some of the new voters that Trump picked up in the 2024 election are immediately adjacent to the demographics he is pledging to attack: positioned near the margins, on the receiving end of injustice, they feel the urgency of violence more than most. ↩
\nThere is a longstanding tradition, stretching back to Aeschylus’s Oresteia, of works of philosophy and literature claiming that state power and its attendant centralized judicial system were invented in order to put an end to the cycle of violence that Girard claims is the inevitable outcome of the pursuit of retribution. In the Icelandic tradition, the equivalent work is probably Njáls Saga, which recounts blood feuds and conflict resolution across a half century in the days before Iceland had a centralized government. Centralized state governance took hold in Iceland much later than in ancient Greece, however, so we can compare the myth presented in the Oresteia with the reality of Icelandic history. In fact, centralized government did not spontaneously emerge in Iceland as a means to resolve conflict; rather, once conflicts between various local parties became irresolvable, the king of Norway was able to take advantage of the opportunity to bring Iceland under his control and impose his rule upon it. If this example is any indication, the reality is precisely the opposite of the myth: those who cannot resolve conflicts among themselves will eventually be subordinated to the state, which is itself the result of unresolved conflict that has metastasized into a permanent condition, not the solution to unresolved conflict. ↩
\nIn order to supply the American public with sacrificial violence, the previous generation of Republican politicians repeatedly invaded Iraq. That was a kinder, gentler time, when sacrificial victims were chiefly sought outside the borders of the United States. Just like today’s war on the undocumented, those invasions were justified with discernibly false pretenses and scaremongering. The result was sort of drunken spree from which politicians of both parties emerged with regrets, having completely destabilized the Middle East and made the world a considerably more dangerous place. ↩
\nThe toppling of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was many years overdue. Yet the tragedies in Syria are not over. Israel has bombed hundreds of locations around the country and seized a considerable amount of land in the southwest, while Turkish proxy forces are threatening to attack northeastern Syria in order to carry out ethnic cleansing. As in 2019, when Donald Trump gave Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the green light to invade the country, we call on people around the world to engage in solidarity actions to discourage the world powers from permitting this to happen.
\n\nTo humanize at least one of the countless people whose lives hang in the balance here, we offer the reflections of a Russian anarchist volunteer in northeastern Syria who has participated in the revolutionary experiment in Rojava for many years. He describes watching the Russian mercenaries exit this country where they have inflicted so much harm, hoping that one day, he might see the same soldiers lay down their arms in his homeland, just as Assad’s mercenaries have.
\n\nFor more updates on the situation in northern Syria from anarchist internationalists on the ground, you can follow this Russian-language telegram channel or consult the website of Tekoşîna Anarşîst.
\n\nI am composing these lines sitting on the cold and dusty floor, leaning against the wall. I really want to sleep. Over the past two weeks, I have lost all sense of what time it is—I have not often had the chance to be on the surface. Sleeping on a thin mattress in a common room is a routine I am used to. We often fall asleep at different times. Sleep is interrupted by people walking from room to room, information being transmitted by phone and radio, alarms being raised because of possible SNA1 attacks on our position. To freeze under a swath of open sky, straining my ears over the beating of my own heart—can I hear Turkish drones in the sky? Are there artillery salvos, are there missiles flying?
\n\nAnd so I sit here, hugging my rifle and wrapping my face in a scarf. And the long hours of waiting drag on.
\n\nOf course, I think a lot about the situation that has rapidly unfolded in Syria. I can’t shake the feeling that we are on the brink of a major war. Yet here, the view of the quiet villages occupied by pro-Turkish fighters on the other side of the front line can be deceiving. Everything looks calm; the fields between us are empty; nothing moves.
\n\nIn reality, this is the result of several years of war. The balance of precautions that has developed over this time: traps, mines, surveillance cameras and patrols on both sides—all of these narrow the possibilities for offensive action. Realizing this, I feel an invisible tension that stretches to the horizon in the direction of the enemy.
\n\nThis situation is periodically shaken by the arrival of artillery shells and gunfire. The people at the other positions around us are in a similar situation. There is a city behind us, and pro-Turkish fighters can try to break through us straight to it. Everyone in our position is ready to defend against any attack.
\n\nIn contrast to the daily reality on our part of the front, we are able to watch the news. Events are developing at breakneck speed. The Assad regime has fallen, Manbij is under attack by the SNA, Deir ez-Zor is in the hands of the SDF2 to prevent the Islamic State from capturing the city—and now Shehba has been surrendered, Deir ez-Zor has been handed over to HTS,3 there is fierce fighting in Manbij and the subsequent retreat. Almost a million people have been forced to leave their homes due to new hostilities. Israel has been bombing military infrastructure throughout Syria. A lot of contradictory and incorrect information is circulating on various channels. It is clear that information warfare and psychological war are being waged. This is intended to influence people’s perceptions of the situation, to shape the discussions and the general mood as well as the coverage that other media outlets provide, not to mention its effects on the participants in the events themselves.
\n\nThe news about the adoption of the green-white-black tricolor with three red stars as the flag of the new, post-Assad Syria occasioned special discussions among us. The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North-Eastern Syria considers itself part of this Syria. In view of the history of this flag, which became a symbol of the revolution in the country and the banner of the uprising against Assad in 2011, this move is not surprising.
\n\nThere are also contradictions. HTS took this symbol into circulation. But it does not belong to them. Now an opportunity has opened up to make the project of democratic confederalism a possible option for all of Syria and beyond. Politically and in many other ways, Rojava is stronger and richer than HTS. The latter has just had a wave of success, while in Rojava, we have experience and a well-developed idea. The SDF would also prefer a political solution to the situation in Syria. SDF Commander-in-Chief Mazloum Abdi said that no one wants war here except for the pro-Turkish proxies.
\n\nWatching all this, some quick and perhaps naïve thoughts flash through my head. Footage from cities liberated from the regime shows people celebrating the fall of the regime. I have noticed that there are almost no women visible among them. This seems like a significant contrast to what many of the rallies and marches in Rojava look like.
\n\nThe thought has also crossed my mind that it could become possible to see previously inaccessible places in Syria. After many years of dictatorship, traveling from Rojava to Damascus, for example, without “special routes” has seemed impossible. And what about the millions of people who were born and raised here? What about the Kurdish population, who for a long time were not even granted passports? What about those who were born after their parents were forced to emigrate from Syria? Or the generations who have known nothing but Assad’s rule and war?
\n\nThese reflections bring me back to the situation in Russia. Witnessing the broad Syrian opposition, millions of people watching what is happening with hope, packing their bags to return home, it is difficult not to think: what will it be like when the same thing happens in Russia?
\n\nThe Assad regime was guaranteed by Putin’s power; its fall has already completely changed the position of the Russian army here. Following the soldiers of Assad’s regime, who realized that they were no longer in danger from the old order and abandoned their equipment, weapons, and positions, the Russian army is also leaving. I watched with special feeling as the Russian columns passed by me at one of the positions. I peered into the faces of the soldiers, trying to understand whether they realized that all these years, they had been terrorizing the population with bombings, they had surrendered Afrin to the Turkish army, they had kept Assad’s regime alive—and now all this is over. Russian military aid to the Syrian dictatorship has ended. I do not think that those soldiers realized that they were looking into the eyes of a man from the same country as themselves, but who chose the other side of the barricades.
\n\nAs will probably happen in Russia one day, the fall of the regime here has created a space that must be filled by a new political system. HTS, the former Al-Qaeda in Syria, which is doing its best to appear “presentable,” is unlikely to be able to organize a new state without a quick collapse or a new crisis. Although they overthrew Assad, HTS is not a liberation force in terms of its values. Perhaps in Russia, we will also see the regime collapse thanks to forces that are far from the values proclaimed by the Rojava experiment. Women’s liberation, the coexistence of various ethnic groups and other identities, each with their own autonomy, communes—today, in the Russian Federation, these are not especially popular topics, even in the opposition milieu.
\n\nWhatever the character of the force that overthrew Assad, it will stir up hope in the hearts of millions. It will also open the door for new ruling elites and their interests.
\n\nHope and enthusiasm are in short supply in the fight against Putin’s regime today, but they are necessary for success. Sometimes, we will have to endure deep contradictions and disappointments.
\n\nIn between my reflections, everyday affairs, and the organization of defense, our daily life is not without familiar things. An Arab comrade, who has been through almost all the fronts of the defense of the revolution, pours sugar into the teapot with full ladles, laughing and saying, “Dims” (Kurmanji for “syrup”). A cat named Myshka wanders among us, and we joke that she is part of the defense. A comrade next to me diligently writes Arabic script and shows her work to the Arab comrades, who patiently check her spelling.
\n\nSunrise is coming. We are ready, the strong sweet tea is invigorating, and a new day is ahead. Events are moving very quickly—every couple of hours something new and unexpected happens. What awaits us today? I don’t know. But the thought that we are standing in defense of the revolution and its ideals together with people of all ethnicities and ages from around Rojava, that each and every one of us is making a contribution, gives me strength and clarity. I hope that Rojava’s survival will bring victories to our anarchist movement, which, in my opinion, can learn a lot here in Syria.
\n\nSyrian National Army, a proxy force serving the Turkish government. ↩
\nThe Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the military of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. ↩
\nHay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a coalition of Sunni Islamist insurgent groups from northern Syria. HTS evolved out of Jabhat al-Nusrah, which began as al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria. ↩
\nParticipants in CrimethInc. projects are collaborating with veterans of other anarchist media platforms on a new podcast, The Beautiful Idea, which will offer reporting and analysis of current events. The first episode of The Beautiful Idea has just been released!
\n\nIn their own words:
\n\n\n\n\nWe are happy to announce the first episode of The Beautiful Idea, a new project from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We’re bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis. We plan to put out about two episodes a month; one will be more focused on action news and include shorter interviews with front-line activists and organizers, and the other will feature longer, more deep-dive interviews on specific topics, including theoretical and historical analysis.
\n\nOn today’s show, we feature our “Behind the Barricades “roundup of movement news, events, and updates, along with a look at the recent burst of media coverage following the shooting of a United Healthcare CEO in New York. Then we speak with someone involved in a new campaign to support Stop Cop City defendants facing both RICO and domestic terrorism charges. Finally, we consult a longtime anarchist to look back on the historic mobilization against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/15/1.jpg\")
\nOn the one-hundred-year anniversary of the uprising in Georgia against Soviet annexation, the struggle for independence from Russian rule remains the chief force driving the popular mobilization that has been growing over the past several months. Yet today’s movement points to a horizon beyond the choice between Europe and Russia, two of the imperial powers contending for influence in the region. It expresses a growing social anger at both the local authoritarian regime and the grip of foreign economic powers upon the Caucasus in general.
\n\nContrary to the dominant media discourse, this popular mobilization is not simply a demand for Georgia to be integrated into the European Union. From a distance, it may seem reminiscent of the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine, but to grasp the deep tumult that this particular struggle represents, we need to look closer.
\n\nThis article was prepared by a Georgian anti-authoritarian in exile in communication with local collectives in Tbilisi, Kutaisi, and Zugdidi. The photos are courtesy of მაუწყებელი / Mautskebeli. Georgians themselves refer to the country by the name Sakartvelo.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/17.jpg\")
\nIn order to understand what is taking place in the streets of Georgia without falling into nostalgia or insurrectionary romanticism, we need to listen to the expression of social anger. This article is aimed at readers in the West, particularly in Western Europe, where many people are trapped in a reductive campism, which presents the movement in Georgia—as well as other struggles in the post-Soviet context, such as in Ukraine or Chechnya—as simply aligned with the interests of the Euro-Atlantic bloc, omitting the geopolitical stakes vis-à-vis Russian imperialism and internal authoritarian policies.
\n\nOthers looking on from a distance are swept up in a confused exhilaration. The sudden burst of media attention—on a scale we apparently did not deserve even during the 2008 war—tells only part of the story, focusing on the insurrectionary aesthetic of gold stars and European flags waved bravely in the face of water cannon jets.
\n\nTo attract the attention of the West, you need either tragedy or spectacle. We’ve experienced plenty of tragedy throughout the last few decades. But the recent history of the post-Soviet territories remains a gloomy stain in the backdrop of wars and conflicts, not close enough to really grip the media consumer, not far enough away to inspire guilt.
\n\nIn our country, the spectacular is more in the mountains than in the street. This time, however, the images of protesters with fireworks, the scenes of direct confrontation with the police, faces covered in blood, have had an effect, both on the corporate media and on the insurrectionists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/20.gif\")
\nThe French news network BFMTV reports on the riots live from Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi, while the Georgian Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, employs a discourse that we had already heard from the same channel during the Yellow Vest movement in France, speaking of “violent rioters” and “assailants of the forces of law and order.” European politicians are expressing shock at the police violence and denouncing the disproportionate use of the repressive apparatus, while Georgia’s ruling party, “Georgian Dream,” broadcasts scenes of police charges and raids on demonstrations in Europe in its own anti-Western propaganda.
\n\nSo why all the attention now? What geopolitical and economic stakes underpin these events? We see pro-Western and pro-Russian forces, a local authoritarian regime rubbing shoulders with BRICS [the transnational alliance involving Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa] and the Euro-Atlantic far right, neoliberal progressivism employing murderous methods. But what is the Georgian population’s own struggle, what are the reasons for their anger at the government and its increasingly authoritarian policies?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/15.jpg\")
\nFor a deeper understanding than can be gleaned from the images that reach Western Europe, we need to situate the events in their immediate local context, and at the same time, frame them in the post-Soviet period in general.
\n\nAlthough protesters have been taking to the streets all night long for the past week and are gaining momentum in several cities, they are part of a social movement that began last spring against the “foreign agent” law.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/5.jpg\")
\nAgainst this backdrop, the parliamentary elections were clearly rigged to keep the ruling party in power: Georgian Dream, led by the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili.
\n\nEven before the Prime Minister’s declaration suspending discussions about integrating Georgia into the European Union until 2028, people were organizing demonstrations to contest the election results and call for new elections. Police violently dispersed those demonstrations, brutally attacking and arresting people; demonstrators faced ununiformed assailants alongside the police, as well as imprisonment and other forms of legal repression. Yet strikes, resignations from the state bureaucracy, and student mobilizations in regional schools have only gained momentum, going beyond the issue of the election. People have occupied the Georgian Public Broadcaster, First Channel. Already-existing collectives are participating in these protests, including residents of peripheral regions who were already resisting environmentally destructive projects, student movements fighting for access to housing, queer and feminist collectives, and people mobilizing against evictions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/11.jpg\")
\nToday, the threat of authoritarianism hangs over everyone, heralding the establishment of a state of emergency and a curfew to stifle the possibility of protest, as well as the reform of the state bureaucracy—a maneuver intended to inflict mass layoffs of opponents and anyone deemed critical of the regime.
\n\nAt the same time, police repression is intensifying: hundreds of people have been arrested, including minors and young adults; police have sent people many people to the hospital, leaving one young man in intensive care, while carrying out mass searches and beating and humiliating people in the streets. Officers in the riot police who seek to resign are themselves repressed by their colleagues, as revealed by an officer who left the country. For several nights, it has been the “zonderebi,” the “titushkebi”—the armed plainclothes “strongmen” employed for the “dirty work”—who have been prowling the streets to brutalize demonstrators and journalists. The government has also announced a reform of the police, facilitating access to services without going through competitive examinations, in order to speed the recruitment of new personnel in order to achieve the capacity to stifle a movement that is now taking on national proportions.
\n\nIf the Georgian Dream party came to power in 2012 by opposing the neoliberal government of Mikheil Saakashvili and its bloody police state, it has since come to represent the same police system. It uses police and judicial violence in a tripartite form: French-style street repression (anti-riot weapons, kettling, beatings, and the like), Russian-style judicial repression (arrests and prison sentences for activists and opponents), and mafia violence (beatings by the “thugs,” violence targeting people at their homes, threats to relatives and family members) reminiscent of the methods of the regime of Mikheil Saakashvili, who left office in 2013.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/1.jpg\")
Images of people wounded during the demonstrations.
\nThe generalized rage against the “Kotsi” and the “Natsi”—derogatory terms designating respectively the party in power and the opposition, the United National Movement (UNM), as well as their allies—is evident in the tirade of insults launched against both camps during the rallies. There is too much anger for people to use refined rhetoric; the insults fly in outbursts on television and during public speeches. For the same reason, the politicians of the UNM are driven out by demonstrators, some of whom suffered under their regime before Georgian Dream came to power. “The resistance to the police regime that allowed this government to take power will also mark its end,” activists declare during their speeches, particularly during the rallies organized for the release of all detainees.
\n\nThis rejection of both parties reflects a profound defiance of the authorities and a refusal to submit to the caricatured dualisms that they promote: the Western civilizational project versus the Russian war project, progressivism versus obscurantism, subservience to Western hegemony versus subservience to territorial imperialism, ultra-liberal nationalism versus ultra-conservative nationalism. The point where these dualisms converge is also their breaking point: unbridled policing, policies that make it impossible to live, exploitation of natural resources as part of the global imperial market, the impoverishment of the population in exchange for economic and geostrategic alliances with foreign powers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/16.jpg\")
\nTo delegitimize the movement, the government uses rhetoric to revive the divisions associated with “polarization,” putting UNM politicians in the spotlight. The government presents itself as the guarantor of national sovereignty in the face of the threat of war from the north and the danger of a coup d’état by Western forces, constantly manipulating the example of Ukraine to sow fear. They compare the current movement to the Maidan uprising in order to argue that it is not self-managed but controlled by partisans of the Maidan and the UNM, insisting that the Ukrainian revolution led to hundreds of deaths and then, to war.
\n\nThis anti-Ukrainian rhetoric minimizes both the social dimension and the form of agency specific to the Maidan movement, which cannot be reduced to neo-Nazi forces alone. It is consistent with the anti-war rhetoric deployed throughout the electoral campaign. The way that the government displayed images of the wars as election advertising proves that, behind the illusion of maintaining peace, we find the most despicable methods of maintaining power. They are exploiting the traumas of our collective memory, which remain raw—not only from the war that occurred in 2008, but also from the tumultuous years of the 1990s, which saw an independence movement accompanied by a putsch, a civil war, and inter-ethnic conflicts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/14.jpg\")
\nThe current use of police brutality and legal repression was facilitated by new legislation passed last spring, which also serves as the foundation for ideological rhetoric based on anti-Western authoritarianism.
\n\nThe law regarding “transparency of the influence of foreign forces” reintroduces a project that was dropped a year and a half ago after mass protests. The law was adopted last spring, a year later, after two months of demonstrations and the circumvention of a presidential veto.
\n\nModeled on a Russian original, this law requires any nonprofit organization receiving 20% of its annual income from foreign sources—whether those are grants or individual funding—to register as an “entity representing the interests of a foreign force.” In a local economy marked by the absence of public subsidies and alternative sources of income, contrary to the official rhetoric, this law does not endanger the large NGOs as much as small associations, unions, and independent media, as well as local and self-managed collectives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/13.jpg\")
\nPrime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze openly stated that this law is primarily aimed at silencing the centers of resistance and struggle during his briefing on December 3: “We will build the Namakhvani Dam.”1 The implication was that with this law in place, nothing will prevent the implementation of hydroelectric mega-projects, considered the pinnacle of economic development. Kobakhidze was referring to the Rioni Valley movement, which is now labeled pro-Western, despite being labeled pro-Russian three years ago. This movement, a self-managed environmental struggle led by locals which managed to force a Turkish company to back down from building a mega-hydroelectric dam, has become one of the main targets in the government’s rhetoric; they frame it as a threat to so-called energy sovereignty and independence. In response to the prime minister’s statement, residents of the valley held a banner at a rally in Tbilisi: “The Namakhvani Dam will not be built.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/21.jpg\")
Protesters carry a banner opposing the Namakhvani Dam.
\nIn addition to the Rioni Valley movement, many local resistance movements are fighting against the social and environmental injustices caused by large-scale economic projects, including the exploitation and extraction of natural resources.
\n\nIn Mingrelia, in western Georgia, residents of the village of Balda are mobilizing to prevent the beginning of construction work on an ecotourism development project involving the privatization of the river, land, and living spaces, as well as significant damage to mountain slopes.
\n\nIn Shukruti, residents are fighting against the exploitation of the soil for manganese extraction by the Georgian Manganese company, a British holding company of Stemcor. Due to the explosions, the village is sinking into the ground, taking the houses of its inhabitants with it. The usual vigils occupying the construction site were moved this autumn to the Parliament in Tbilisi, with more radical forms of protest: hunger strikes and lips sewn shut.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/12.jpg\")
\nBut behind these small popular struggles are the stakes of the big economic players: China, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran and, of course, the European Union. Their power struggles are translated into inter-imperialist alliances, conflicts, and wars in which energy is a weapon par excellence.
\n\nThe war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia have strengthened Georgia’s geostrategic position within economic infrastructure projects like the gas and oil corridor, hydroelectric resources, and maritime and land transit routes. The law on foreign agents presents itself as a guarantor of the realization of such projects. At the same time, the government has adopted the offshore law, the anti-LGBT law, and amendments to the law on pensions, as well as signing energy and economic memoranda with Turkey and China.
\n\nAll of this seems to be part of a strategy of rapprochement with BRICS, particularly with China and Azerbaijan, to strengthen trade by expanding its role as a transit corridor. Georgia plays a strategic role in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s initiative to create a “new silk road” by integrating the China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor. Georgia’s involvement is based on two key projects: the construction of a new port in Anaklia, which is intended to become a major hub, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway line, intended to strengthen logistical connections between Asia and Europe.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/10.jpg\")
\nThis strategic position enables the Georgian government to exert pressure on the European Union, in particular because of its involvement in the colossal project to build an extensive undersea electricity cable, which would transport electricity supplied by Azerbaijan to the European Union, passing through the Black Sea in Georgia. A significant amount of energy transit already takes place through pipelines crossing Georgia, including the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) oil pipeline and the SCP (South Caucasus Pipeline) gas pipeline, which connect the Caspian Sea to Turkey via Georgian territory.2
\n\nConsidering these geostrategic alliances for the conquest of resources, we can see that the simplistic division of the world into two major blocs—on one side, the Euro-Atlantic bloc and on the other, Russia—no longer makes sense. Now, we must understand the geopolitical chessboard as a multipolar space. Similarly, geopolitically speaking, the Georgian Dream party allies itself as much with the governments of the Euro-Atlantic extreme right (Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán) as with regional powers on the basis of a populist, sovereignist, and conservative discourse. Economically speaking—in terms of its rapacious extraction policies and intent to dispossess and impoverish populations—it is fully in line with the globalized capitalist market alongside the progressive camp.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/9.jpg\")
\nIn order to reinforce the social conflict already initiated by the establishment of Western hegemony in this country, in particular through the interference of institutions and NGOs in the economic and cultural spheres, the government has skillfully appropriated an anti-Western discourse, arousing the sympathy of a part of the population despised by the “pro-Western” part. This rhetorical masquerade allows it to set up certain “social groups” as scapegoats in order to justify the establishment of an authoritarian regime for the defense of “peace, tradition, and economic sovereignty.” In addition to those “blocking” energy independence, it is “the LGBT group” that supposedly represents one of the chief threats to our cultural and religious identity.
\n\nThis is the context in which the new anti-LGBT law, called the “Law on family values and the protection of minors,” came into force on December 2. The law, which equates homosexual relations and gender identity with incest, criminalizes queer people themselves as well as access to healthcare that the law deems “medical manipulation.” In addition to the queer community, the law also criminalizes any form of support, demonstration, public gathering, or public stance that could be labeled as “pro-queer propaganda.” The collective Queer Resistance wrote about the law’s application in its “anti-fascist manifesto”:
\n\n\n\n\n“In Georgia, where nearly a million people have left the country to migrate in search of work over the past five years, one in three children lives in extreme poverty, while the education and healthcare systems are in ruins, the greedy oligarch has based his election campaign on false promises of peace and the propagation of artificial hatred.
\n\n“By criminalizing a part of the population—queer people—and legalizing hatred and censorship to establish totalitarian control, the law also designates as criminals all those and everything that opposes the legislation of this evil.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/3.jpg\")
\nConfronting the impoverishment and widespread indebtedness of the population, a situation in which banks and private services hold absolute power while the question of national identity still remains to be defined, it became necessary to create a new image of the enemy. This enemy is not far away in Russia or Turkey, but right before our eyes, forcibly imported by the West: the enemy whose very life itself, as well as appearance in public, threatens our morals and traditions and contributes to demographic problems. This is part of an operation to redirect anger over social problems, aiming to replace an old archetype of the enemy with a new one as a catalyst for the construction of identity.
\n\nHowever, if the responsibility for criminalizing queer people lies with the government, Western sexual imperialism bears some responsibility for instrumentalizing the queer question. While the missionaries of “human rights” were supposed to protect oppressed minorities, the ultraconservative response made them one of its first targets, using the anti-Western argument. Queer-washing only reinforced the social and cultural divide, separating “religious obscurantists” from liberal progressives. The government exploits the LGBTQ issue with such vigor because it knows how to provoke a strong cultural and existential tension by reproducing this opposition and defending the anti-progressive camp that is scorned by “civilizational” policies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/8.jpg\")
\nThis massive protest movement, which has been represented merely as pro-European rallies, has its own specific forms of organization, sociality, and mutual aid.
\n\nThis is something you would never find on the streets of Europe. During the rallies on Rustaveli Avenue, traditional dances, folk songs, and religious songs take center stage; the cool kids of Gen Z shout slogans—the “Gaumarojos Sakartvelos”—that could just as easily be heard from the mouths of the “obscurantists” as a toast to the fatherland, freedom, and the church; mothers accompany their children.
\n\nMothers accompany their children—in the vain hope of protecting them from police abuse. A mother’s cry—“Let go of her, she is my child”—has become the watchword of the protest, now inscribed in graffiti. Grandmothers, when they still have the strength to move, are surrounded and protected by demonstrators against water cannon fire; priests come out of the Kashveti church to shelter persecuted demonstrators.
\n\nBehind the gas masks, the shields painted with the numbers “1312,” there is also the idea of the common, which expresses itself first and foremost as a sense of collective belonging, crushed throughout the history of its existence, and adds a strong cultural, even existential dimension to political resistance.
\n\nRustaveli Avenue has seen many police, military and paramilitary raids since the independence movement of the 1990s. Protesters from the “parents’ generation” evoke the memory of April 9, 1989, the date that marks the tragic beginning of the independence movement with the deaths of young protesters crushed beneath Russian tanks. The use of ununiformed forces and the manipulation around the question of war invoke collective memory: the war crimes of the Mkhedrioni paramilitary group, particularly in the regions of Mingrelia and Abkhazia, a collective trauma arising from the destruction of both bodies and souls following the massacres of Ossetians and Abkhazians, the ethnic cleansing of Georgians and forced displacements, as well as the rupture of inter-ethnic and family ties.
\n\nTo understand what is at stake behind what can be interpreted as the desire for the West, we must bear this history in mind. First the Tsarist empire, then the Soviet empire made Russia one of the chief colonial powers ruling Georgia, following the Ottoman empire.
\n\nTo recall the course of the recent history of liberation, Georgia and then Chechnya proclaimed their independence in 1991, before the fall of the USSR. All this took place in a landscape marked by the intensification of both nationalist and ethno-nationalist struggles, calling for the secession of minority ethnic groups under the protection of the USSR (Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Ossetia).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/6.jpg\")
\nFollowing a coup d’état, civil war broke out in the capital between Georgian separatists, led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, and the putschist opposition, which became the State Council led by former communist leader Eduard Shevardnadze. This war degenerated into a so-called inter-ethnic conflict from 1991 to 1993 in Abkhazia.
\n\nThe 2008 war with Russia, although it took place in a different context than in the 1990s, revived the same wounds related to ethnic and territorial conflicts. This time, it was South Ossetia, another region mostly populated by ethnic minorities, that ended up being occupied by the Russian Federation.
\n\nBut let there be no mistake: although the question of the autonomy of ethnic minorities in a territory where a multiplicity of languages, religions, and traditions coexist is a crucial issue, Russia remains an external superpower that uses ethnic tensions as leverage in a power struggle with the sole aim of expanding its territorial reign. Just as in Ukraine, Russia has always known how to associate the violence of its imperial regime with the conflicts over ethnic identity in the Caucasus, setting itself up as the “savior of oppressed ethnic minorities.”
\n\nThis is why, behind the European flags, we find the hope for a better world, and behind the desire for the West—the desire for independence. But the idea of Europe as a horizon does not only arise in opposition to Russia. It also emerges from the propaganda and soft power of Euro-Atlantic neoliberal hegemony, which has continued to extend its zone of influence over post-Soviet territories since the collapse of the USSR.
\n\nFor us, the generation of the 1990s, who grew up in the post-war period following the decline of the independence movement, the promise of the pro-Western path represented the dream of a better world that had been on the other side of the Iron Curtain: peace, bread, electricity, hot water, education, and health. Today, even if Europe continues to embody some kind of promise for a part of the population, no one is fooled.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/4.jpg\")
\nSince the liberalization of visas in 2017, Georgia remains on the list of countries with high asylum demand, alongside Afghanistan and Bangladesh. This statistic shows that, in a population of 3.5 million inhabitants, each family has at least one member in exile and migration, seeking protection and subsistence conditions, in order to gain access to free health care or sufficient financial resources to support the relatives who have remained in the country, or else to repay the loans of a family that is deep in debt. Labeled as “bad exiles” because they are “economic migrants” or migrating “for health reasons,” not only are they denied the right to travel freely, but, in addition, they are subjected to all kinds of institutional and police violence, ranging from hundreds of illegal expulsions to the deaths of detainees in detention centers following police violence.3
\n\nWhile Europe would like to map Georgia under its sphere of influence, its treatment of the Georgian population in exile and economic migration has revealed its deception and duplicity.
\n\nConsequently, for the emigrant population, particularly in the context of growing racism and the rise of the extreme right, Europe no longer represents a mythical power that could save us from warlike imperialism and guarantee better social policies in a country prey to private predation. For the population of Georgia, insofar as geopolitical issues are mixed with questions of identity, if turning towards Europe represents a survival strategy for some, the chief concern, now even more so than before, remains the authoritarianism of the local government.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/7.jpg\")
\nTo conclude, I’d like to share the message of support sent to comrades in Georgia from Paris:
\n\n\n\n\n“From the gathering of Syrian comrades celebrating the fall of dictator Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, and of Georgian comrades organizing in support of the current protest movement, we want to bring the message of internationalist solidarity to peoples in struggle against imperialism, local authoritarian regimes, and social injustice.
\n\n“At a time of genocide in Palestine, wars in Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, the rise of authoritarian regimes in Georgia, Iran, and Russia and the extreme right in Europe, the only hope lies in building alliances and solidarity between oppressed peoples. Only the people can save the people!
\n\n“From Syria to Georgia, may the regimes fall everywhere!
\n\n“Freedom to all the prisoners in Georgia!
\n\n“Love and rage,
\n\n“Internationalist comrades from Paris”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/11/2.jpg\")
A solidarity demonstration in Paris. “From Syria to Georgia, may the regimes fall everywhere!”
\nThe construction of the Namakhvani Hydroelectric Cascade, the largest hydroelectric facility on Georgian territory since the end of the USSR, by the Turkish company ENKA. ↩
\nAlready in 2006, the construction of the pipeline had aroused much opposition from locals. It goes without saying that the local economy has not received any financial benefit from these pipelines owned by the multinational consortiums BTC Co. and South Caucasus Pipeline Company. Their management is shared between European companies like British Petroleum and those of Azerbaijan and Turkey alongside Russia and Iran. ↩
\nVakhtang Enukidze in 2020 at the CPR Gradisca d’Isonzo, Italy; Tamaz Rasoian, a Georgian-Kurdish national, at the Merkplas detention center, Belgium, in 2023. ↩
\nTuesday, December 3 marked the sixth consecutive night of clashes between police and anti-government protesters in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. We offer the following short report and video footage courtesy of Georgian anarchists.
\n\nThe demonstrators are responding to the recent victory of the political party started by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose wealth adds up to a quarter of Georgia’s entire gross domestic product. This party has been pursuing an agenda emulating the regime of Vladimir Putin, seeking to consolidate power while directing public resentment at scapegoats—for example, passing legislation in October banning same-sex marriages, adoptions by same-sex couples, gender-affirming care, and positive portrayals of LGBTQ+ people in the media.
\n\nLike Armenia and Serbia, Georgia has become a destination for Russians fleeing the recruitment drives supplying Putin with cannon fodder to toss into the invasion of Ukraine. Less than a month ago, Russian anarchist exiles in Georgia reported that the victory of the pro-Putin party Georgian Dream in the parliamentary elections of October 26 had brought the opposition movement to an impasse:
\n\n\n\n\nIt seems that the mainstream opposition has reached a dead end. They cannot move to more radical actions—they act within the framework of liberal democracies, and the ruling party does not care about resistance that remains within the framework of the law, as they have force and administrative resources on their side. November 4 was a very dismal rally, there were much fewer people than at the protests against the “foreign agent law”1 (but still quite a lot). In general, it feels like there is no trust in the opposition parties.
\n
Over the past week, however, protesters have adopted more radical tactics, engaging in frontal confrontations with the police.
\n\nAlthough anarchists are among the tens of thousands of participants in these protests, they comprise a small minority. The common sentiment connecting the participants is distrust of party politics in general, opposition to the stranglehold that the Georgian Dream party has on power, and hostility towards Russia, which has ruled Georgia for the better part of the past two centuries and defeated it in a war in 2008.
\n\nWhile some pundits have joined pro-Russia politicians in comparing the protests in Georgia to the Maidan protests that led to the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014, there are significant differences. For example, the authors of the following text report no overt nationalist or fascist involvement in the demonstrations. Yet it remains to be seen whether a revolutionary horizon could emerge to compete with the neoliberal goal of integrating Georgia into the European market.
\n\nEven if no such horizon emerges, it is significant that the movement in Georgia has been compelled to shift from simply holding rallies to engaging in open conflict. As in 2019, when revolt spread from Hong Kong and Ecuador to Chile and Catalunya like a string of firecrackers going off around the globe, participatory resistance in one part of the world often foreshadows or inspires resistance in another. The tactics that serve demonstrators in one struggle are often taken up elsewhere.2
\n\nAnd the challenges that people in Georgia face—rule by billionaires, a reactionary clampdown on freedoms, an opposition controlled by feeble liberal leadership, and an absence of revolutionary alternatives—are similar to the challenges that hundreds of millions face in the United States and elsewhere around the world.
\n\nHere follows the perspective from Tbilisi.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/04/1.jpg\")
An anarchist flag seen on the barricades in Tbilisi on the night of December 2, 2024.
\nThe Georgian Dream party has been in power since 2013. It is spearheaded by the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia. Over the past decade, this party has advanced a Pro-Russian agenda, turning the country slowly and surely away from the West. This year, Ivanishvili went so far as to claim that the 2008 Russo-Georgian war was started by Georgia—a core claim of Russian propaganda. In the parliamentary elections of October 2024, the Georgian Dream party won by a significant margin amid widespread claims of voter intimidation, bribery, and fraud. A few protests took place afterwards, but the energy of the Georgian citizens was at a low. How many protests, peaceful or otherwise, had taken place since the rise of Georgian Dream with little tangible results?
\n\nThe straws that broke the camel’s back were, first, the nomination for president (which is performed by the ruling parliamentarian party) of a former football player with no qualifications and a history of allegiance to Georgian Dream and to Russia—and, second, the confirmation that the talks regarding joining the European Union will cease until 2028. This second point was especially ironic, given that Georgian Dream propaganda has featured a lot of EU imagery. The outrage over this second point struck the match that set off the firework protests.
\n\nProtesters gathered by the tens of thousands outside of the Parliament and began their demonstration. One could hear the chanting of “Slaves! Slaves!” and rhythmic banging at the metal gates that protect the doors of parliament. Riot police were sent out; by 11 pm, they were deploying tear gas. The police began making arrests; video footage shows several beatings, as well as officers pulling citizens into the wall of police.
\n\nGenerally, the demonstrators were unprepared for the clashes of the first night. Some had had the foresight to bring gas masks and eye protection, but most were forced to retreat. Those who had come prepared became the first line of attack and they persisted throughout the night—many until noon the next day—throwing eggs and shooting fireworks into the sky.
\n\nThis time, demonstrators showed up angrier and more prepared. The fireworks of the previous day had tripled in abundance. Since the new year was coming up, a great deal of fireworks were available for purchase. This is a longstanding Tbilisi tradition thanks to a lack of regulation regarding who can purchase fireworks. Every new year, thousands of fireworks light the sky. Having spent New Year’s Eve in both North America and Tbilisi, the fireworks in Tbilisi are comparable to the kind of display you can see in major metropolitan areas of the United States on the Fourth of July.
\n\nNovember 30, Tbilisi. It started as just a few fireworks in the sky.
\nDemonstrators began aiming fireworks directly at the parliament building. There were people scaling the walls to break the windows so that the fireworks could be thrown inside, amid loud cheering from the entire crowd. Throughout the night, the booms of fireworks could be heard.
\n\nThis time, the police arrived late, after protesters had already assembled several barricades, blocking the side streets that lead into the main avenue. I witnessed metal benches being pulled from their foundations and added to a barricade many times that night. Fires were lit, and people rushed to the front lines to throw firework “grenades” at the police.
\n\nNovember 30, Tbilisi. Demonstrators gather by the parliament building.
\nThat night, some ingenious demonstrator fashioned a kind of makeshift firework launcher that shot several fireworks on some sort of rotating barrel. Aiming it directly at the police, he dodged a water cannon shooting water mixed with tear gas. Word spread through WhatsApp and Telegram urging demonstrators to assist in creating barricades and directly fighting the police.
\n\nAround 2 am, the police were able to break through the barricades and unleash the tear gas, resulting in a kind of mass stampede. Demonstrators were yelling to each other not to run too fast, to be mindful of each other. Many retreated, but many remained until the next day, making more barricades, setting fires, launching fireworks, and throwing whatever they could at the advancing police.
\n\nMany people were beaten and arrested in the course of Saturday night. The police grabbed whoever they could, beat them, and detained them. Those who were beaten very badly, often to the point of losing consciousness, were released, but fined between 2000 and 3000 lari [the equivalent of up to approximately $1000]—leading one badly beaten person to say to my cousin, “They beat us unconscious and then they fine us for it—it’s like a mass mugging!”
\n\nNovember 30, Tbilisi.
\nThose who sustained less serious injuries were put on trial on Sunday. They were given inadequate council, forced to defend themselves, and accused of being “intimidators” who were instigating violence against individual policeman. My cousin’s friend is expected to be held in jail for seven days.
\n\nNonetheless, on Sunday night, a similar amount of people hit the streets. All the tactics used before had solidified and protesters brought whatever they could to help. Once again, barricades were built, fires were set, fireworks were thrown, and street objects were dismantled to aid in the fight. My sister witnessed a few demonstrators taking apart the outdoor umbrellas of a restaurant. When the restaurant owner came out, the owner helped instruct the demonstrators regarding how to properly disassemble them so that the demonstrators wouldn’t get hurt.
\n\nDecember 1, Tbilisi. People from older generations and younger generations came out in solidarity. There are children protesting and grandparents protesting. They say that if you don’t come to the protests, “You are Russian.” The whole city of Tbilisi has been outside for days on end.
\nDecember 1, Tbilisi. Down the alley is a line of “robocops” with plastic shields and a firetruck spraying water laced with tear gas. So when people shoot off the fireworks, sometimes it ricochets off the shields and falls back into our line. You can see it exploding very close to us. The people armed with respirators, saline solution, goggles, and rain gear are on the front lines throwing rocks, glass bottles, and eggs and shooting off fireworks.
\nDecember 1, Tbilisi. Here, people are pointing lasers at the cameras to prevent them from conducting surveillance in order to protect identities of the ones on the front lines. Some also use these lasers to blind the police so that they are not able to target specific people when they direct the water cannon. At this point in the evening, people on the front line were running out of fireworks but, as in a game of telephone, called back to people and asked for more. Some people ran off to collect more while others had stashes in their bags to give out. It was frightening that you could not tell whether the smoke was water vapor from the water cannons, smoke from the fireworks, smoke from the bonfires, or tear gas.
\nDecember 1, Tbilisi. The people at the front lines remained at the parliament, while the rest of the protesters were preparing for an inevitable police charge involving beatings and arrests. They began building a barricade using everything from benches and trash bins to tables and shelves. Some restaurant owners even allowed for their patio rain covers to be ripped out and used as shields against the hosing.
\nDecember 1, Tbilisi.
\nDecember 1, Tbilisi.
\nIn addition to the suspension of the European Union candidacy, Monday marked the first day that the new anti-LGBTQ+ law went into effect.
\n\nMonday was more of a standstill. Instead of at the parliament, the fighting took place on the street. There was a defense line of robocops holding their plastic shields, and on the opposite end, we had our fighters shooting off fireworks. However, the police were using copious amounts of tear gas. You could feel the effects from a mile away. They were also using rubber bullets. This was happening at the very front of the street. People in the back continued making barricades and blocking off side entrances. There were people handing out saline solution, sandwiches, water, and goggles.
\n\nDecember 2, Tbilisi.
\nDecember 2, Tbilisi.
\nDecember 2, Tbilisi.
\nDecember 2, Tbilisi.
\nDecember 2, Tbilisi. The large sign in front of the monument to medieval Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli reads “Freedom.”
\nGeorgians aren’t generally organized. They rely on communication at the scene and word of mouth. In the past, during demonstrations, this has led to a lot of misunderstandings and to the spread of misinformation, which ultimately resulted in the demonstrations fizzling out. This time, however, people seem to be in complete agreement: it’s time to escalate. I heard no demands to curb the actions under the vague umbrella of “peaceful demonstration.” Instead, wild cheers accompanied any action that threatened the foundations of the parliament. If the doors could have been wrenched open, I have no doubt that we would have flooded through.
\n\nIn general, the outcome of these ongoing demonstrations remains unclear. International news sources have reported that the participants are calling for another election, but I don’t think that is the case. The time for diplomatic appeasement seems to have passed. Whether this will result in outright revolution is unclear. But the protests don’t seem to be slowing.
\n\nWe have received no report from Tuesday night, only the following videos.
\n\nDecember 3, 2024
\nDecember 3, 2024
\nDecember 3, 2024
\nDecember 3, 2024
\nDecember 3, 2024
\nDecember 3, 2024
\nA law requiring organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from overseas to register as “agents of foreign influence.” Charging that the law was modeled on Russian legislation used to target opponents of President Vladimir Putin, opposition groups staged some of the largest protests in Georgia since it became independent in 1991. Nonetheless, the law was passed in June 2024. ↩
\nIn connection with this, we note that some participants in the unrest in Tbilisi have been using this tool to track the movements of police and ambulances. ↩
\nAlong with others around the country, we invite you to join us in organizing festivals of resistance on the weekend of January 18, immediately before Donald Trump takes office. This is a crucial opportunity to engage in outreach, education, and action ahead of what it is sure to be a tumultuous time.
\n\nOnce Trump takes power, it will only become more challenging to make connections with our neighbors, create the networks that we will need to face down his assaults, and share the skills we will need to survive his reign. Right now, we have a precious window of time in which to prepare. Let’s make the most of it.
\n\nFor an incomplete list of events, start here.
\n\nWhen Donald Trump enters office on January 20, he will order mass deportations, escalate the repression of protesters, dismantle the few judicial and legislative provisions that still protect ordinary people, and consolidate a propaganda ecosystem intended to stupefy us all into obedience. The Democratic Party is willingly handing power to an autocrat they say will bring democracy to an end; the Democrats show every intention of continuing to ratchet their own politics to the right. Authoritarian leftist groups are simply treating this as a recruitment opportunity.
\n\nBut from Texas to the West Bank, millions of people’s lives are about to get even harder. We owe it to each other to meet the second Trump era side by side in solidarity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/1.jpg\")
\nThe chaos that will accompany the return of the Trump administration represents an opportunity as well as a challenge. This is a chance to assert an autonomous pole of organizing, carrying forward the lessons of 2020 and the movement against Cop City while continuing the fight against patriarchal violence, white supremacy, and colonialism.
\n\nBy organizing ahead of Trump’s inauguration, we can seize the initiative and set our own timeline rather than being caught flat-footed and forced to react. We need to welcome new participants into these struggles and foster a revolutionary perspective that can orient us through the challenges ahead. No amount of internet activity could substitute for gathering face to face. The most important battles ahead will not be fought online, but in the streets of our communities.
\n\nJanuary 18 is observed as the Day of the Forest Defender. It will be the two-year anniversary of the murder of Tortuguita in Weelaunee Forest. It is an important date to gather, honor the memory of the fallen, and pledge ourselves to resistance and to one another.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/2.jpg\")
\nYou could start by calling for an assembly bringing together everyone who wants to participate in organizing. It could be a public gathering—if you think you can facilitate something on that scale—or an invitation-based conversation bringing together people who have already worked together or at least have cause to trust each other.
\n\nFor the event proper, you could host workshops and distribute literature teaching security culture, digital security, protest safety and first aid, direct action, reproductive autonomy, forms of organization including affinity groups, and other skills that may be relevant in the years to come.
\n\nLocal organizers could share stories and lessons from the history of resistance in your area during the first Trump era. You could facilitate discussions to identify what people need to do to prepare for the years ahead—both for their own safety and to ensure the safety of their communities—or to strategize about how to prepare to confront the Trump agenda in your region. You could do an art build for future demonstrations and an organizing fair to connect people to local projects. This will be a chance to expand rapid response networks for community defense and mutual aid.
\n\nIn some places, the gatherings could conclude with public actions—a first salvo in the resistance to Trump’s plan for mass deportations. Elsewhere, there will be open assemblies, spaces for people to encounter each other and learn new ways of working together and sharing ideas. Small towns can screen documentaries or invite speakers to share their expertise.
\n\nIt’s up to you and your community to decide what best fits your local context. The important thing is to create a space that can serve as a point of entry for everyone who needs to get connected ahead of the next round of struggles—a space where people can hone their skills and begin to think of themselves as a collective force.
\n\nNo matter who Trump’s administration targets—whether immigrants, Palestine solidarity organizers, sex workers, schoolteachers, trans people, environmentalists, or people seeking abortions—we must show that we will love and protect one another. If we all pull together, showing everyone who wants to resist that there are movements that they can join, we can begin to build the strength that we will need to overcome the challenges ahead.
\n\nEvents like this are already being planned in dozens of cities and towns. But time is tight. If we want to be ready, we have to get started now.
\n\nPlease repost and circulate this call! If you want your event to be listed, please contact us.
\n\nThese are some of the events being organized in relation to this call.
\n\nChicago, Illinois: A training about fighting deportations, as part of the week-long “Regroup and Strategize” series.
\nSacramento, California: “Call to Action” conference and gathering, featuring a “day of skillshares and trainings” along with workshops, panels, and a keynote presentation from anarchist author Dean Spade. You can find more information and a full schedule here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/5.jpg\")
\n Atlanta, Georgia: A mass mobilization and day of resistance on the two-year anniversary of the murder of Tortuguita.
\nBrooklyn, New York: A community gathering including workshops.
\nCarbondale, Ilinois: A community event, currently in the planning stages.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/11.jpg\")
\n Cleveland, Ohio: 3 pm Coventry Peace Park, 5 pm Rhizome House
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/14.jpg\")
\n Dayton, Ohio: 5 pm, Union Hall, 313 South Jefferson; a community discussion followed by music
\nDurham, North Carolina: The Triangle Festival of Resistance, a weekend-long festival focused on community defense, resilience, and liberation. For updates and information about how to contribute, consult Triangle Radical Events.
\nGary, Indiana: A demonstration against mass deportations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/13.jpg\")
\n Medford, Oregon: 40 South Central Avenue, starting at 10 am on Saturday (and continuing at 11 am on Sunday)
\nMilwaukee, Wisconsin: 6 pm at Nice Hair, with workshops on trans defense, migrant defense, self-defense, and movement defense
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/15.jpg\")
\n Minneapolis, Minnesota: A screening of Fell in Love with Fire with letter writing to prisoners and a discussion about the next phase of struggle at the Seward Cafê at 6:30 pm.
\nOakland, California: A march to a community assembly, departing from Wilma Chan park next to the Lake Merritt BART at 1 pm.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/12.jpg\")
\n Olympia, Washington: The People’s March, 12 pm, departing from Heritage Park; followed by the Festival of Resistance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/10.jpg\")
\n Phoenix, Arizona: 3-8 pm, Margaret T. Hance Park, featuring a Really Really Free Market, food, literature tables, and a number of educational workshops
\nPortland, Oregon: A gathering in a COVID-safer, sober space. Families with and without children are welcome to attend. Food will be provided.
\n\nYou can also find updates about event organizing in Portland here.
\nProvidence, Rhode Island: 3 pm - 9+ pm, AS220
\nRichmond, Virginia: A community assembly involving panel discussions, workshops, and food, followed by a benefit concert.
\nEvents are also being organized in Salt Lake City, Utah and elsewhere.
\n\nAsheville, North Carolina: “Rad Fair,” 1 to 3 pm; resistance to mass deportations with author Jessica Pishko and CIMA at 4 pm; a screening of “Fell in Love with Fire,” a documentary about Chile’s 2019 popular uprising, at 6:30 pm.
\nChapel Hill, North Carolina: The second day of the Triangle Festival of Resistance.
\nArcata, California: A march departing from Arcata Plaza at noon—against Donald Trump, in solidarity with Palestine, and in memory of Tortuguita.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/4.jpg\")
\n Tampa Bay, Florida: A community gathering and organizing fair for “politics beyond the ballot box.” “Organize with your community to fight for transformative change! Connect with a local project from anti-capitalist orgs, labor and tenant unions, mutual aid orgs, and more!”
\nWichita, Kansas: A community organizing assembly at Safe Streets Wichita, 3-5 pm
\nThese posters are available for promoting events in response to this call. Fill in the details of your particular event in the blank space!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/6.jpg\")
Download the printable PDF here
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/7.jpg\")
Download the printable PDF here
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/8.jpg\")
Download the printable PDF here
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/03/9.jpg\")
Download the printable PDF here
\nThe Syrian civil war has remained largely frozen since 2020, owing to a precarious balance of power between various factions with various degrees of support from Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the United States. Over the past few days, however, taking advantage of the ways that Iran and Hezbollah have been tied down by conflict with Israel while Russia has been distracted in Ukraine, the anti-government forces Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have seized Aleppo and intensified their campaign against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. While Assad has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and his downfall would be welcome, this development poses new dangers.
\n\nAs we have explored before, the situation in Syria is complex, and the same events can look very different from different vantage points. In order to triangulate a reality informed by many views, we present here a perspective from participants in the revolution in western Syria alongside a report from anarchists in Rojava, the northeastern region of Syria.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/02/1.jpg\")
Aleppo, 2024.
\nThis is a translation of a statement from the Cantine Syrienne de Montreuil, a project established by participants in the Syrian revolution in exile. You can read an interview with them here.
\n\nAn alliance of various “rebel” groups (jihadists, Islamists, mercenaries under the tutelage of Turkey, and the like) has launched a major offensive in recent days to break the encirclement of the city of Idlib by the regime and its allies, and to respond to their murderous attacks. The operation has regained territorial control of Aleppo (Syria’s second largest city) and the surrounding area.
\n\nThis offensive follows the destabilization of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah as a consequence of Israel’s attacks. Longtime allies of Assad, the Iranian-controlled militias have continued to pound rebel areas of Syria following October 7, 2023. Even after the beeper attack orchestrated by Israel in Lebanon, Hezbollah attacked Idlib (on September 20 and 23, 2024) before withdrawing some of its troops to Lebanon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/02/4.jpg\")
A protest in Idlib.
\nIn a catastrophic humanitarian and economic context, the military operation by the “rebel” groups has forced hundreds of people to leave the areas that have recently fallen under their control (for fear of reprisals), but it has also enabled hundreds of displaced people to return to their lands and homes and see their families after long years of separation and harsh survival in the refugee camps.
\n\nYears ago, Aleppo was already liberated from the Assad regime and self-administered by its residents from 2012 to 2016 before falling back into the hands of the regime thanks to the support of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. After a brutal siege, a relentless bombardment in which 21,000 civilians were killed, and the nearly total destruction of the eastern part of the city, the fall of Aleppo marked a decisive military defeat for the Syrian revolution.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/02/2.jpg\")
“We will return.” Graffiti on the first day of the civil evacuation deal when Aleppo fell into the hands of the regime.
\nToday, we can only rejoice to see the regime’s forces compelled to flee from Aleppo: images of detainees freed from prisons, statues of the Assad family toppled, portraits of [Supreme Leader of Iran Ali] Khameini, [slain secretary-general of Hezbollah Hassan] Nasrallah, or [slain Iranian military official Qasem] Soleimani torn to shreds. But let’s be clear, there is no cause for hope for the future of Syria in the areas “liberated” by these military groups, be they jihadists or “moderates.”
\n\nThis operation, though decided and coordinated in Syria, could not have seen the light of the day without the green light from Turkey, which itself seems to have been overwhelmed by the scale of the offensive. Let’s face it, few still believe that [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan is a friend of the Syrian people anymore. Turkey massacres Kurdish populations in Syria and elsewhere, organizes forced deportations of Syrian refugees, has been trying for years to normalize relations with Assad, and uses Syrian fighters as mercenaries for its geopolitical interests, not to mention repressing all internal dissent.
\n\nAs for the Islamist groups, their power has been contested for years by the civilian population of the areas under their control. In 2024, large-scale demonstrations took place in Idlib to demand the departure of [Abu Mohammad] al-Joulani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (HTC), the group that governs the enclave. Without popular legitimacy, HTC rules by force; it has failed to fulfill the hopes of the 2011 revolution. The Syrians who rose up against Assad’s tyranny and sacrificed so much to be able to live in freedom cannot live under groups like HTC in the long run.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/02/5.jpg\")
Al-Joulani = al-Assad.
\nA bitter and ambiguous joy, then. Much remains uncertain. The humanitarian consequences are likely to be catastrophic. The regime and its allies have stepped up attacks on the areas already controlled by the “rebels” as well as the areas they have just recaptured. Hospitals in Aleppo are already overwhelmed by the lack of resources and staff. We still don’t know what the position of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces will be. The only thing we can be sure of is the eternal return of the supporters of the “axis of resistance,” who, under the guise of opposition to Israel and western imperialism, will once again whitewash the butchers who have murdered and displaced our families and friends.
\n\nIn the midst of all this, we are largely dispossessed of our revolution and the possibility of self-determination in our country. Between the foreign powers who play their influence games with our blood and the Islamist militias who speak only the language of weapons, for the time being, brute force and geopolitical calculations will decide our future. The situation is not excellent, but the fall of the regime remains the prerequisite for any change in the country. Again and again, the people want the fall of the regime.
\n\nLong live free Syria!
\nGaza will live, Palestine will be free!
\n“They must all go” for a free Lebanon!
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/02/6.jpg\")
The sign reads, “The guarantee of our victory is the departure of Turkey from our lands.”
\nA general overview of the main developments the past two days, contributed by internationalist anarchists in Syria.
\n\nThe offensive of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) made a breakthrough in the first days toward east (Aleppo) and south (Hama) and slowed down on December 1-2. Assad regime forces appear to have recaptured the city of Hama and halted the advance of HTS towards Homs city. Russian air forces are carrying out an extensive bombing campaign, targeting HTS units but also civilian and military infrastructure in Idlib, Aleppo, and along the route of the HTS advance. There are reports of both civilian and combatant casualties. Jets belonging to the Assad regime have also carried out airstrikes, but on a smaller scale. In Aleppo, in the Kurdish district of Sheikh Maqsood, the residents have prepared for self-defense.
\n\nNorth of Aleppo, Şehba canton is been occupied by the [Turkey-backed] Syrian National Army (SNA). Thousands of people who have lived in refugee camps since the Turkish invasion of Afrin in 2018 are now being evacuated. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are organizing a humanitarian corridor to enable people to exit Aleppo and Şehba. No major clashes are reported between the SDF and SNA for now.
\n\nIn some other regions of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), artillery shelling and drone activity occurred, but no more than usual.
\n\nThere are reports of the Iranian-backed militia Hashd Ash-Shaabi moving into Syrian territory in the Deir-Ez-Zor region in large numbers. In the same region, the SDF and the Deir-Ez-Zor military council are making moves to take some towns and villages under control.
\n\nThe forces of the Islamic State that remain in the desert of central Syria have not been seen to make any major moves, but it is expected they will use the situation to the best of their ability.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/02/7.jpg\")
A map published by Al Jazeera showing the current distribution of territorial control in Syria.
\nThe SDF has called for a mass mobilization, asking for young people to join SDF and to be ready to repel the upcoming attacks on the liberated territory. It is a common expectation that the escalation will intensify and Turkish-backed factions will use the opportunity to attack the western regions of DAANES, such as Minbij.
\n\nAt first, there were rumors about an attempted coup in Damascus; if such an attempt did happen, it seems to have quickly failed.
\n\nEgypt, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran have expressed support for Assad regime.
\n\nThe Democratic Autunomous Adminsitration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, is in the middle of the new turmoil. The number of refugees arriving in the western cantons, counted together with the number of people who have been arriving from Lebanon over the past few months, could easily exceed 200,000 in the coming weeks.
\n\nIn the first days of the HTS offensive and the SNA push against Şehba, as well as the siege of Sheikh Maqsood, it is clear that Assad regime is in very difficult situation; it seems possible that it will collapse. However, any potential rule by HTS will not be stable and will not be able to resolve the pressing problems that the dictatorship of Bashar Al-Assad created and exacerbated for Syria. Nevertheless, the fall of Assad might open a window of possibility for change in the region, if Syrians—both those who remain in the country and those who will decide to come back after exile—manage to revive the original ideas of the Syrian revolution.
\n\nMajor global powers like Turkey, the United States, and Israel will benefit from the HTS offensive. HTS fits all of their needs as a force that is opposed to Iran, Assad, and Russia. Given the chance to take up state-making if they win, following the Taliban model, it is possible that main actors in HTS will exercise their influence in a possible future new government. It is even possible that the aforementioned states might support HTS in taking power, seeing as they are not interested in the Syrian peoples independently deciding for themselves.
\n\nThe fall of the Assad regime would be good for the DAANES in various ways, but it also poses major questions:
\n\nA) There is a serious danger that, freed of the necessity to fight against Russia and Assad, the Islamic State will take the opportunity to grow again, although they will also be in conflict with HTS.
\n\nB) We can expect that the United States will be increasingly invasive and manipulative if the DAANES becomes more dependent on the United States to protect it from a potential Turkish invasion.
\n\nC) Finding a new balance of forces in the region is sure to be chaotic and bloody, and it is not clear how it will conclude.
\n\nD) This is especially true as Turkey will be expanding the zone of its direct control much deeper into Syria.
\n\nE) Finally, the religious fundamentalists of HTS taking over western Syria will provoke sharp conflict with the revolutionary project in notheastern Syria, especially in regards to how that has changed the status of women in society.
\n\nThe situation for Lebanon will be very difficult, as the country is going to be sandwiched between Israel and the HTS-controlled part of Syria. This might lead to the escalation of internal conflicts. Hezbollah will be left without a corridor via which to receive support from Iran.
\n\nIn the regional context, to some extent, the DAANES represents a non-state solution based on self-governance and cultural, religious, gender, and ethnic autonomy. Still, it gets the least international support.
\n\nRevolutionary greetings!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/12/02/3.jpg\")
Aleppo, 2024.
\nThis follow-up report reaches us from the same group of internationalist anarchists in Syria.
\n\nSo many things are happening today, it is difficult to summarize. We will share some relevant updates, with the disclaimer that we are not an intelligence service but just some revolutionary anarchists following the situation from northeast Syria.
\n\nThe main news today is the general collapse of the Syrian Arab Army (the army of the Syrian Arab Republic goverment, or SAA), with soldiers withdrawing from many different fronts, even publicly defecting in some areas.
\n\nThe advance of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (the main Islamist opposition coalition, HTS) continues. After taking control of Hama city, they are reaching the outskirts of Homs. Videos of attacks with Shaheen drones (HTS self-produced kamikazes) on SAA military posts in Homs are already spreading in social media.
\n\nAs the HTS offensive moves south, they are also expanding east and west, not only fighting but also making agreements with local groups. In Mahardah, west of Hama, they negotiated the withdraw of SAA soldiers with the local Christian community; in Salamiya, east of Hama, they made an agreement with Ismaeli community.
\n\nTheir western advance is entering desert territory, where the Islamic State (ISIS) has sustained their insurgency. It is not clear if ISIS insurgent cells will confront HTS or welcome them.
\n\nSAA soldiers are withdrawing from positions on the outskirts of Raqqa, with the Syrian Democratic Forces (the military coalition of defense forces in Rojava, SDF) moving to capture those territories to prevent further activity of ISIS.
\n\nA similar scenario is playing out in the city of Deir Ezzor, where apparently there has been some coordination to secure the area with SAA soldiers before they left their positions.
\n\nAt least one town situated 50 km south of Deir Ezzor, Al-quraya, appears to be under control of ISIS forces that moved in as SAA withraw.
\n\nSDF forces also took control of the border crossing with Iraq at Albukamal, which has been a very important crossing point for the coordination and supply lines of various Iranian proxy forces.
\n\nThe SNA make a press statement announcing their operation against SDF in Manbij, urging civilians to stay away from military zones.
\n\nA new front has opened in the south as different rebel groups in Quneitra, Daraa, and Sweida began to take military actions against the crumbling SAA. Allegedly, they have created a common operation room to coordinate the attacks on the soldiers of the regime.
\n\nSeveral groups have been storming checkpoints, police commissaries, and military barracks In some areas. The SAA is reacting to those attacks with bombardments and intermittent clashes.
\n\nVideos of soldiers of SAA publicly defecting and joining local defense militias are spreading in social networks, specially among the Druze community of Sweida.
\n\nAlso in the south—but on the eastern side—the battalion of Al-Tanf is also moving forward. Known as Maghawir al-Thawra, this group was part of the Free Syrian Army (the old name that was used as an umbrella for opposition groups against Assad), but after the emergence of ISIS, their main focus shifted to fight against the caliphate. They received training and weapons from US, as well as support in their operations against ISIS. In recent years, they had been blocking the routes of Iran weapon deliveries and making raids targeting Captagon drug smuggling groups. Now, for the first time, they left their local area of operations and are clashing with SAA forces in Palmyra.
\n\nAllegedly, Israel is bombing chemical research facilities to prevent them from falling into the hands of the “Rebels.” Allegedly, Russia is evacuating parts of their air force stationed in Syria.
\n\nThere are reports suggesting that a coup against the Assad government may be taking place in Damascus. There are also reports allegedly from Mossad (Israeli intelligence) indicating that Assad has left Syria, suggesting that he escaped to Iran.
\n\nIt is clear that no one has any faith in Assad’s government anymore. We feel confident announcing that this is the end of the regime. For many Syrians, today will be a day of celebration. After almost 13 years of war, misery, and exile, their dreams of a Syria without Bashar are coming true. In that sense, it is a day of celebration for us too.
\n\nBut the end of the regime will probably be just the beginning of a new phase of conflict and instability, a very difficult one. Syria has become a battlefield where many military forces (both state and non-state) use violence to pursue their objectives without fear of the consequences. This includes the brutality of the Syrian regime and the Russian mass bombings of the civilian population, the horrific massacres of the Islamic State, and the genocidal and imperialist occupations of the Turkish Army and its proxies targeting the Kurdish people and the Rojava Revolution.
\n\nMore than a decade of war and suffering has inflicted wounds that won’t heal with the end of the Assad dynasty, and the following day will probably witness more bloodshed and atrocities. The declarations of SNA operation against Manbij will probably be the beginning of a brutal war of occupation, as we already saw in 2018 in Afrin and 2019 in Serekaniye and Gire Spi. The future in Damascus still unclear, and the Islamism of HTS will soon start to reveal its true colors to the Syrian people. Whatever is shown on CNN, the people of Idlib have been suffering and protesting against the authoritarian rule of HTS for months.
\n\nWestern powers will tacitly accept this apparently diluted version of Salafism, as they already did in Afghanistan. And these big changes will distract people from the massacres that Turkey perpetuates in Manbij, giving the rogue NATO member in the Middle East a free hand in exchange for their loyalty in other affairs that are of higher priority for Western agenda.
\n\nThe revolution in Rojava is under threat, as always. Let’s celebrate the fall of the regime, but let’s keep building the new world we carry in our hearts.
\n\nRevolutionary greetings!
\n\nIf you want to support evacuees in northeastern Syria, you can do so here.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/11/26/insurgent-survival-reflections-on-the-fight-against-sweeps-targeting-the-homeless-in-austin-texas", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/11/26/insurgent-survival-reflections-on-the-fight-against-sweeps-targeting-the-homeless-in-austin-texas", "title": "Insurgent Survival : Reflections on the Fight Against Sweeps Targeting the Homeless in Austin, Texas", "summary": "Stop the Sweeps set out to defend homeless camps in Austin, Texas against forced removals. We explore the history of the movement and what it can teach us.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/header.jpg", "date_published": "2024-11-26T11:02:30Z", "date_modified": "2024-11-27T22:22:36Z", "tags": [ "mutual aid", "solidarity", "homelessness", "texas", "disaster" ], "content_html": "In 2019, militants in Austin, Texas started an organization with the aim of defending homeless camps against sweeps—forced removals disguised as “cleanups” carried out by cops and work crews. This organization, Stop the Sweeps, intervened in a cycle of struggles that included the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, and the winter storm of 2021 while attempting to consolidate a pole for confrontational activity and strategic thinking. Here, we explore the history of this movement in detail, seeking to distill lessons about autonomous organization that can aid revolutionaries in future struggles against dispossession.
\n\nIn June 2019, Austin City Council passed a reform legalizing “camping,” taking away the tool of misdemeanor ticketing from the Austin Police Department, which had used it for two decades to push homeless encampments into the deep woods and routinely dispossess the residents. The NGO left promoted this as a dramatic advance in the civil rights of houseless people, while NextDoor reactionaries decried it as a sign of the debasement of the once great city of Austin. In the news and on Twitter, Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott exchanged barbs with Democratic Austin Mayor Steve Adler, each taking one of these sides.
\n\nThe following November, friends and comrades formed Stop the Sweeps Austin (STS), a political intervention intended to undermine both of those positions. The core aim of STS was to show that both the progressive city and the reactionary state used similar techniques, rationales, and low-wage contractors guarded by police to systematically dispossess the poorest and most marginalized people in Austin—and that in doing so, they were continuing policies of displacement that had begun more than a century earlier with colonization and the policing of enslaved and formerly enslaved populations. Confronting the sweeps was both materially and discursively strategic. The idea was to cut away at the foundation of the post-decriminalization strategy for displacement, heightening antagonism towards both of the political factions that depended upon it.
\n\nTo do this, Stop the Sweeps Austin rallied sympathizers to intervene against weekly encampment sweeps by city and state forces while building parallel networks of mutual aid and political support. STS drew on existing solidarity networks descended from decades-running projects, informed by the living memory of the social movements of the homeless in the 1980s. We also benefitted from historical research and movement elder storytelling to extend our understanding of local history to the founding of Austin.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/13.jpg\")
The sweeps are intended to destroy what little stability and sense of home the houseless are able to establish.
\nWe now recognize that we were a part of a national movement against sweeps that peaked early in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on the momentum of the George Floyd Uprising. Autonomous groups in California, including the Sacramento Homeless Union and Where Do We Go in Berkeley, had been organizing against sweeps through 2019. In an early phase of STS organizing, we were roped into coalition building and national legal work by the Western Regional Advocacy Project; yet these projects did not offer meaningful coordination between groups to advance an autonomous vision grounded in direct action. There were efforts in Los Angeles to build out anti-sweep programs that seemed similar to ours from afar, though they started from a stronger orientation towards social democratic city politics. Fiercer resistance in Minneapolis built to flashpoints in 2020 including the occupation of an empty hotel and militant encampment defense. The circulation of the insurrectionary framework “You Sweep, We Strike” saw attacks on contractors and city infrastructure in Seattle, Santa Cruz, and Minneapolis. It was difficult to connect with these projects to learn from them directly, but easy to boost each other’s content from afar.
\n\nFive years after the founding of Stop the Sweeps Austin and two years after its quiet dissolution, we are writing this piece in hopes of refining the lessons of this recent high point of movement activity. We will begin by painting a picture of the moment in 2019 when Stop the Sweeps emerged, then situate that moment in a longer history of colonization, development, and homeless resistance. Having done so, we will distill the strategic frameworks that guided our organizing, then follow the trajectory of the movement to the limits it encountered. In each section, we will present our hypotheses and the lessons we learned along the way, illustrated via specific practical experiences.
\n\nWe offer these as reflections both for the local movement—to remind it of its history, its victories and defeats—and for revolutionaries everywhere seeking to think through crucial questions about autonomous organization. Today, we are preparing to confront a new phase of camp repression in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Grants Pass” decision, which green-lights criminalization and displacement in California and elsewhere.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/33.jpg\")
A sign on a tent in downtown Austin.
\nBefore 2019, most encampments lasted about three months before police evicted them—a cycle of temporary inhabitation and dispersal. This constant motion is essential to the cycle of development, as it opens up land and keeps bodies moving through the various infrastructures built to profit on them—shelters, social services, housing, prisons, hotels, and stores, all of which increasingly resemble each other.
\n\nThough “camping” was formally legalized in June 2019, enforcement had actually ceased during the winter of 2018-2019. Citing a paucity of funds due to the consequences of the catastrophic Hurricane Harvey in southeast Texas, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) paused its contracts providing camp removal, attempting to hand them off to the City of Austin. The city government did not immediately pick up the contracts at the same pace. At the same time, informal directives were given to APD to slow the pace at which they inflicted tickets for camping, fearing court rulings enforcing an expansion of the Martin v. Boise circuit court ruling, which had slowed camping ban enforcement on the West Coast. This occurred alongside a soft strike by organized Austin Police officers who had significantly slowed their response times to minor crimes, aiming thereby to press their demands for more power.
\n\nThe repeal of the camping ban created a political opening, enabling the camps to survive indefinitely on public land. Tent cities blossomed in January and February, mainly under state-owned freeways, and grew more elaborate. Shanty towns and shelters made from wooden pallets, political signs, and tarps as well as more modest tents and cardboard populated the city north to south and east to west, dotting the parks and the underpasses of major highways and appearing beside libraries and around the social services buildings downtown. This offered new forms of collective stability and security for the unhoused: the camps served as points of connection, stable locations at which to receive social services, and places for those new to life on the streets to get oriented and find support. They represented a strategy for mutual safety against harassment by reactionaries and police, providing a sense of collective life and care.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/36.jpg\")
An encampment below the I-35 overpass in the heart of downtown Austin.
\nThis occupation of space shocked liberals and conservatives alike, many of whom saw it as a display of public disorder or an embodiment of the ever-intensifying crisis in affordable housing. In Stop the Sweeps, for our part, we saw the expansion of the camps as a sign of the self-organizing capacity of the homeless and a demonstration of the power of land occupation—indeed, a signal of disorder for those invested in the property system. STS sought to build connections centering this sense of self-organization to build a defense network against the waves of displacement that were the cause and consequence of life in the camps.
\n\nAt that time, the displacement of the housed poor had continued unabated across Austin for decades, in keeping with national trends and local plans to develop and gentrify first West Austin and then East Austin, which was historically home to Black and brown Austinites following a century of segregation. Recent statistics show that most homeless Austinites were displaced from the zip codes that they currently reside in, often in areas suffering intense gentrification. While most recent literature on rising rents in Austin focuses on the spike following the pandemic, money had been pouring into Austin neighborhoods long before that, aided by historically low interest rates intended to flip houses and entire blocks into money makers. Projects that had been paused since the previous real estate bubble burst in 2008 were resumed during the 2010s with towers and “luxury” apartment blocks mushrooming from the mycelial networks of capital and property that had accumulated and expanded during the “bust” period.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/39.jpg\")
\nIn the late 2010s, the local Maoist movement (now mostly disbanded and critiqued as a cult by former members) waged a years-long struggle against a development slated along East Riverside, an effort to reinvent a low-income area as a luxury new-urbanist hotspot: the Domain on Riverside. The developers ultimately succeeded in evicting low-income renters from multiple high-density apartment complexes, which consequently remained boarded up for years just a short walk away from one of the largest encampments on that avenue.
\n\nThese Maoists represented a political pole in 2019 Austin, offering a mixture of public and secretive activity that prioritized direct action and confrontation with a diffuse array of enemies that they saw as aligned with the interests of capital. On the one hand, this meant that developers were confronted in public meetings and at their homes, and on the other, that former allies were castigated online and in person after political breaks. The Maoists also confronted other minor political figures, including DSA-oriented candidates, and disrupted their meetings. At the time, the Maoists had developed a reputation for being arrested, both at marches and in their homes, and facing elevated charges. Their former leader, Jared Roark, who went by the name Dallas, was arrested in his home for weapons possession after a tragicomic confrontation with an expelled former member of the Maoist’s armed unit.
\n\nThe DSA and an array of activist non-profits oriented towards electoral and council-level reforms represented another pole of activity. While less active in the streets, this alliance fused respectable political activity—rallies, press conferences, and testimony at City Council—with flirtations with abolitionist frameworks. The Homes Not Handcuffs coalition emerged out of this scene; they won the 2019 camping ban rollback, spawned the autonomous mutual aid organization Street Forum, and recomposed briefly to defend the camping ban at the polls in 2021. Their organizing relied heavily on personal relationships with City Council “progressive” heavyweight and current Texas Representative Greg Casar and on a progressive political machine comprised of organizations like Grassroots Leadership and Workers Defense Project, which had won reforms at similar scales through the City Council in the 2010s.
\n\nSTS oriented ourselves by drawing from political traditions and organizations that overlapped with these but were distinct from them. Many of the initial organizers were drawn from the local anarchist milieu, which had been working to draw links between different tendencies and organizations. One was the Peaceful Streets Project, which had emerged from right libertarian circles amidst the Occupy Wall Street cycle at the end of 2011, but had split left in the course of a decade of anti-police struggle. PSP served as the local Copwatch, filming police interactions and developing an aggressive interventionist style in which they named and shamed local cops, occasionally becoming personally known to the police themselves.
\n\nAnother influence were members of the Autonomous Student Network, who had cut their teeth organizing at the University of Texas and had gone on to participate in the Peaceful Streets Project and the Occupy ICE movement that established an occupation outside a detention center in San Antonio; they also helped to start Street Forum. These organizers brought an experimental streak to organizing, with a willingness to take risks and say what only anarchists can say.
\n\nContributing historical memory and serving an organic link to Austin’s homeless movement were members of The Challenger Street Newspaper, also born in 2011 out of the ashes of The Advocate, a long-running more traditionally NGO-style paper. From its beginnings, The Challenger was smaller and scrappier than the Advocate, with more will to participate politically in social movements. The Challenger published monthly issues with articles written mainly by homeless people in Austin, focusing on life on the streets of Austin, political commentary, poetry, and art. The Challenger had resuscitated the memory of Homer the Homeless Goose, the mascot of the Street People’s Advisory Council—a direct action organization of homeless Austinites in the 1980s who led occupations of vacant buildings and, famously, the downtown lake.
\n\nAlong with contributions from other early members involved in anti-prison struggles and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the DSA (which was focused on mutual aid), these organizations helped build the political framework that STS used as we attempted to build an alternative pole, intervening in the fight to defend the camps. This enabled us to synthesize tactics and strategic insights from a variety of experiences. Coupled with insatiable demands and a hostile attitude to the state, that equipped us to punch above our weight.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/27.jpg\")
The shelters were full.
\nNow that we have set the stage in 2019, let’s back up to explore the history of homelessness in Austin and the movements combating it.
\n\nThe City of Austin was established as a military maneuver intended to project burgeoning Anglophone power westward after Texan independence from Mexico in 1836. Settlers established a semicircle of forts to the west to defend the new capital from raiding Comanches and other Indigenous people. Austin’s famed Barton Springs are part of a chain of springs in Central Texas that had been in continuous use by Indigenous peoples for over 10,000 years; they appear in some Texas rock art. Military campaigns and raiding and surveying parties sought to drive Indigenous peoples from their lands throughout Texas. The city’s first camping ban excluded Indigenous peoples from camping inside city limits.
\n\nSlavery was an integral part of the economy of early Austin, with up to a third of its earliest recorded population comprised of enslaved Black people. White people who enslaved twenty people or more were known as “planters” and held special status. As a consequence of the boom-and-bust cycles of for-profit agriculture, planters often enslaved more people than they could put to work on the plantations that ringed the city. Consequently, many enslaved people worked and lived in the city instead of on plantations. They provided various urban services, remitting a percentage of their income to their enslavers.
\n\nSome elements of the ruling classes sought to target these Black people who were enslaved but living somewhat independently. They formed Vigilance Committees of private citizens to maintain white power in the districts where these people lived. Later, they demanded the establishment of a municipal police force so that the public would have to pay for the policing of Black people. This was one of the origins of what became the APD.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/34.jpg\")
A continuing history of white supremacist violence: troopers playing a role in the sweeps targeting the houseless.
\nAnother famously followed the Civil War some years later. With slavery abolished and the fighting over, freedmen and former Confederate soldiers arrived in the city alongside other poor whites. Black freedmen established communities—sometimes permitted on private land, but often squatting near creeks and in other undesirable or far-flung areas of town. To discipline these surplus populations, the city government proposed a police force. The Black Codes forced Black people who did not find employment to labor in conditions resembling slavery. Black work crews assembled that way played a major role in constructing Austin’s State Capitol.
\n\nAlongside the police, a series of city plans served to structure the racial order of the city. Following the official decree of segregation in 1928, slums comprising over ten percent of the town’s area were evicted. People who were renting or who did not have clear title to the land where they resided were displaced en masse through these “Slum Clearance Plans” and federally funded Urban Renewal programs, and the land was often turned over to state use (including the sites of the University of Texas, the state government, and the hospitals between Congress and the I-35 Freeway). These displacements served to impose a line between a Black and brown East Austin and a white West Austin. This segregationist project shaped the messy post-emancipation reality of scattered Freedmen’s towns and Mexican enclaves over the following 80 years.
\n\nAccording to Gus Bova, in the 1970s and 1980s, subsidized housing fell out of favor alongside a generalized crisis in manufacturing work. Across the country, people were being thrown out of industrial work while cheap housing was disappearing, and Austin was no exception. The local booms and busts in the housing construction market, which employed low-wage labor, contributed to this. Federal policy also began to support housing as a collateralized asset, both for big banks and consumers, seeing a hot real estate market as a sign of a healthy economy that bolsters consumer spending and debt. Periodically, this policy gets ahead of itself, spawning crises like the one in 2008—but even at the best of times, it inexorably raises housing costs for everyone while concentrating property in the hands of fewer and fewer landlords.
\n\nThe city’s “Innovation Team” traces the beginning of NGO work intended to benefit the homeless to 1966, citing a charity’s pamphlet offering services to “transients” and “non-residents.” Bova and the “Innovation Team” both point to 1985 as a watershed year in which the city set up the first of many task forces to fight homelessness. Bova concludes that by 1985, the accumulation of crises in employment and housing had produced considerable homelessness in Austin.
\n\nNot long after, the Street People’s Advisory Council (SPAC) formed, bringing together rebels from the Task Force with politicized homeless people. Drawing lessons from actions against the Vietnam War, these activists purchased a goose which they publicly threatened to kill and eat, after first considering a swan donated to the city by a member of the local elite. After the goose drew the attention of an outrage-hungry press, they pardoned the goose and named him Homer. Homer and his human compatriots went on to lead occupation marches on abandoned buildings and the flotilla occupation of Town Lake.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/22.jpg\")
Activist Molly Ivins, who camped out in protest of Austin’s 1996 Camping Ban, meets Homer the Homeless Goose.
\nThe SPAC and Homer captured headlines, hearts, and minds for several years, helping to generate an activist milieu that included the Mad Housers (a collective of builders that constructed mobile shelters and the flotilla rafts that were used to occupy the lake) and the Blackland CDC (a neighborhood organization which co-organized the occupation of vacant houses being demolished by the University of Texas in east Austin). They operated as a part of nationwide movements, joining organizations like the National Homeless Union, the Houston Homeless Union, and others in coordinated campaigns, including one dedicated to takeovers of vacant housing.
\n\nThey won some reforms, including increased shelter funding, the dedication of vacant housing to serve as transitional housing, and a decades-long detente on UT development of the Eastside; but the SPAC campaign was ultimately repressed. The APD consistently hounded the organizers; allegedly, so did other homeless people, and “animal rights” activists concerned for the well-being of the adventurous Homer. City officials played a role in repressing the flotilla protest, changing a “night-fishing” ordinance that allowed the legal occupation of the lake to create new restrictions that made it possible to seize the boats. Nonetheless, the story of Homer and the SPAC and their direct action served as inspiration for activists from the Challenger Street Newspaper to launch several efforts of their own throughout the 2010s.
\n\nThe next major cycle of struggle emerged in response to Austin’s camping ban in the mid-1990s. Research by Gus Bova locates the impetus for the camping ban in activism by the Downtown Austin Alliance (DAA), a consortium of downtown business and land owners. According to Bova, the DAA was incorporated as a Business Improvement District, a quasi-governmental organization to which businesses pay special taxes to fund private security and political activity. Their first move was to organize “Downtown Rangers” who biked around downtown harassing homeless people and acting as the DAA’s private arm of the Austin Police Department, which supervised them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/2.jpg\")
Austinites protest the camping ban proposal at City Hall in 1996.
\nThe DAA also began to organize for a camping ban, picking up model legislation from the American Association for Rights and Responsibilities—which shared white nationalist co-founder John Tanton with the anti-immigrant group Federation for American Immigration Reform. Though the ban passed easily in 1996, its passage led to a brief wave of campouts by housed people in protest. A year later, the city council was preparing to repeal it, as it had only served to shuffle people from place to place in the city and deeper into the woods. Amid pressure from the DAA, the council led by then Mayor Kirk Watson “compromised,” keeping the ban but establishing homeless services in downtown Austin. This led to the establishment of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH), which served as an anchor for similar services in the area. It also illustrates the connection between homeless services and policies that police and harm their clientele.
\n\nIn addition to the camping ban, city police and administrators used their powers to harass homeless people and encampment communities. One example is captured vividly in the 1995 documentary Bouldin Creek Greenbelt Family, filmed by camp residents themselves as well as housed cable access volunteers. The film chronicles the daily life and communal practices of the camp, including a scene in which the residents grill burgers for more than a dozen people for dinner time. This pastoral peace is disrupted by cops on horseback who bark orders at the residents to vacate before sending heavy machinery to destroy their property and territory. The family is scattered about town with whatever possessions they can carry.
\n\nThe Bouldin Greenbelt Family.
\nThese practices of harassment and disruption met an opponent in the late 1990s in Leslie Cochran, a gender-defying homeless resident who, encountering repression upon moving to town, became a one-man army agitating against the police. Leslie’s crusade—which included city council appearances, elaborately painted signs protesting his treatment by APD, and a run for mayor—put him front and center in the popular imagination of Austin in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His legacy is complicated. His nonlinear, playful relationship with gender made him the butt of jokes about trans people and a celebrated spectacle of the Austin Weird. Many people forget that around his much gawked-at thong, his ass was often painted “Kiss this, APD.”
\n\nAlongside Leslie and the camping ban campout, other homeless organizing lacked the thread of direct action and independence that had characterized the SPAC. One such campaign was House the Homeless, established by legal aid worker Richard Troxell. Troxell took credit for creating the concept of the police Winnebago in Philly, and for the one-hour health exemption to the no-sit no-lie ordinance that followed the DAA’s campaign for the camping ban. Troxell, to his credit, acknowledged the roles of both the wage system and the police in creating and perpetuating homelessness, but followed these ideas into increasingly wonkish policy proposals. Also on the scene was the Austin Advocate, which successfully organized the first street newspaper with homeless vendors, including Leslie, staged prominently around Austin. While the Advocate relied heavily on these vendors, the vendors had little role in the writing or publishing process.
\n\nA split in the last months of the Advocate led Val Romness, a longtime producer of homeless media involved in the Austin Cable Access scene that released “Bouldin Creek Greenbelt Family,” to establish the Challenger in early 2011 with Advocate vendor Fred Pettit after the Advocate had ceased meaningful production. The Challenger began operations without nonprofit status or funding, operating more horizontally, though helmed consistently by Romness. This openness, along with creative participation by local anarchists, led to increased ties between the paper and radical milieus, with early collaborations with Monkeywrench Books, Austin Anarchist Study Group members, Treasure City Thrift, and remnants of the then-dissipating Rhizome Collective. In late 2011, these relationships helped to foster the Challenger’s intervention in the local iteration of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.
\n\nWhen the revolutionary wave that took shape in Tunisia and spread to Tahrir Square in Egypt reached Austin in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the results were mixed. The first General Assemblies were announced by a distinctly Austin mixture of white yogis and libertarians, who hoped for a non-confrontational interpretation of “Occupy.” In contrast to the tent encampments popping up in other cities, they proposed a 24-hour protest at Austin City Hall with sleeping quarters in an electric taxi warehouse several miles away. The ad-hoc leaders cited the camping ban as the main reason they chose this tack, not wanting to break the law and burn bridges with the police, whom they regarded as part of the “99%.”
\n\nChallenger Newspaper members saw themselves as a part of this eclectic upswell of the downwardly mobile and called for an alternative encampment called Tent City across the river from City Hall to bring attention to their own issues, including the 1%-driven camping ban. Organizers attempted to rally support from Occupy Austin (OA) participants for a sunset confrontation with police, but APD moved in early, dispersing the camp before it could gather steam. Tent City organizers and anarchists relocated the tents to City Hall and set them up, confronting several more conservative members of OA. Tent City and the Challenger made a bold claim for autonomous action early on with the support of an OWS founder, the late, great David Graeber, who was in town visiting his girlfriend and happened to save a toddler occupant from an overzealous opponent of the tents.
\n\nThrough shrewd maneuvering and the opposition of a roused crowd, the ones with the tents won a standoff with APD, establishing precedent for a more robust occupation and the participation of the homeless movement. As the occupation wore on, more and more of those in the occupation at City Hall were homeless, sleeping at the site overnight, though usually on the limestone stairs rather than setting up more tents. This led to tensions within the Occupy Austin movement, as some participants grumbled that their movement had been “coopted” by the poor. Against this tendency, and alongside organizing by participants of color, a more radical streak emerged, making space for a diverse array of voices and actions. The “anniversary” event in 2012 was led by Challenger/Tent City-oriented occupiers. The Challenger had moved its weekly meetings to the occupation and was organizing within it through the Ending Homelessness Working Group (EHWG). On the first birthday of Occupy Austin, the EHWG, the OA General Assembly, and the Challenger called for a march on the City-owned vacant Home Depot building with the intention of occupying it, taking inspiration from OWS and Occupy Oakland.
\n\nThe march on the Home Depot was unsuccessful, but led to several other attempts to occupy other vacant lots around Austin. Homeless occupiers established a camp, also called Tent City, in South Austin, which focused mostly on recreating daily camp life rather than advancing political conflict. Though it was intended as an experiment, the camp hosted a small group of members mostly focused on avoiding the cops, not unlike other camps. It gradually disbanded after several evictions, without the sort of flashpoint of camp defense that might have re-politicized it. Its fizzling led to questions about what sort of organizational capacity successful camp defense would require, questions later consciously taken up by Stop the Sweeps Austin.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/35.jpg\")
Tents line the trail along the Colorado River on the south edge of downtown Austin.
\nFrom 2019-2022, the camps that surrounded and besieged the Capitol practiced an ungoverned and unregulated form of life that violated the order of capital. Recognizing the camps as forms of insurgent self-organization on the part of the dispossessed, we sought to defend them and expand their potential in the face of attacks from a wide array of political forces. This runs counter to the logic of specialization and legibility that typically characterizes activist campaigns, which often aim to represent the dispossessed as a distinct constituency (“the homeless”) through demands and negotiation on the terrain of policy, recruiting to an organization to negotiate on their behalf, and cultivating a specialized minority of “directly-impacted” activists. Instead, we emphasized the defense, generalization, and expansion of forms of insurgent self-organization that are illegible to politicians, social service providers, and activists alike. Where much of the NGO left saw a lack of organization, demands, interests, and representatives, we saw an abundance of potential in the camps themselves.
\n\nWe did not romanticize camps as the revolutionary communes-to-come. Different camps had different cultures and different levels of cohesion. In some camps, people took lots of responsibility for each other, checking in to ensure others were fed, warm, and healthy, with those taking responsibility for assisting others and mediating conflicts forming an organic leadership. In other cases, big personalities declared themselves leaders, with mixed reactions from other residents ranging from dismissiveness to outright hostility. Some camps’ internal dynamics were defined by competition and hostility, with fights and thefts common as people merely tolerated living alongside each other. People would often move between camps as a consequence of conflicts with other residents or as a means to seek different conditions in regards to drug use, fights, noise, pests, or other issues. Recognizing the camps as self-organized phenomena means taking all these contradictory realities into account while still affirming the self-activity at their core as a response to a shared condition of dispossession.
\n\nWhatever the internal dynamics of each camp, their occupation of public space constituted an attack on the logic of property and capitalist development. Land belonging to the city or state government was taken over by forms of organization beyond their control and put to unauthorized and unregulated uses. While privately held property was never directly taken over, the public presence of the dispossessed rendered class conflict explicit and impeded development. The proliferation of camps in close proximity to sites of commerce or luxury apartments made these places less appealing to the comparatively wealthy, who complained about the numerous signs of the dispossessed living their lives in public—including accumulated survival supplies, the buildup of waste from humans living without infrastructure, and public expressions of mental and emotional crisis and other things that those with houses have the luxury of doing in private. A public homeless population coming into contact with students, tourists, consumers, and investors threatened to make Austin an unattractive location for new festivals, conferences, companies, and residents.
\n\nThe proliferation of camps from 2019 to 2022 was an impediment to development and gentrification in Austin, alongside and overlapping with system-wide shocks including the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic downturn, and the George Floyd Rebellion. While the camps are sources of power that impact the political and economic terrain around them, they are not properly political: they do not make demands, they are not legible forms of organization or constituents that can be represented. In recent years, others have used the term ante-political to refer to forces that precede or exceed the traditional sphere of politics. This framework helps us understand the power of the camps and the nature of the political attack on them.
\n\nThe attack on the camps and on the unhoused in general was carried out according to two distinct logics of governance. One is outright exterminationist, its aim being to socially cleanse undesirable populations by dispersing the camps and driving people out of town or into jail cells. The other is managerial, the aim being to regulate the homeless and precarious through services and facilities administered by the state, social service providers, or private and non-profit landlords. The former attacks the camps for simply existing; the latter aims to subjugate their ungoverned activity to managed and profitable social services. Both attack them for violating capitalist order. The same institutions can make use of both logics, like when Governor Greg Abbott opened a Texas Department of Transportation parking lot—now known as Camp Esperanza—as a “shelter” to regulate the homeless and legitimize his sweeps, or when the city government used sweeps to enforce the newly reinstated camping ban in 2022.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/7.jpg\")
A hole in the fence at the sanctioned camp opened by Governor Greg Abbot on a Texas Department of Transportation lot in 2019.
\nThe mainstream movement to repeal the camping ban framed the struggle as a conflict between conservatives and progressives: Greg Abbott and the reactionaries of Take Back Austin on one side, Austin’s social movements, city council, and social service providers on the other. This battle was encapsulated in the ongoing Twitter war between Abbott and Adler over the camping ban repeal. In reality, both the state and city governments depended on the sweeps to manage homelessness, only according to distinct logics. Before the repeal of the camping ban, the city government had been sporadically using sweeps to clear camps, and they kept their own sweep schedule parallel to the state government’s sweeps under the highways. When sweeps resumed after pausing for the pandemic, the city government had taken over all of the sweeps from the State. This shared dependence was most explicitly laid bare when the city government swept the ARCH camp the same day the state government began its sweeps of the highways.
\n\nRe-framing the camps as an ante-political insurgent force can give us a clearer picture of the competing forces that aim to attack this form of insurgency, enabling us to move away from some of the limitations of activist frameworks. Reformist activist approaches can lead us into the trap of allying with the managerial logic of governance in the name of pragmatism, as seen in groups like The Other Ones Foundation (TOOF), Austin Mutual Aid (AMA), and Little Petal Alliance (LPA). More radical activist approaches can end up fetishizing the thinking and activity of the activists themselves, creating organizations that exist for no sake but to reproduce themselves or insular scenes that become disconnected from any material force. Rejecting both of these errors, we believe that focusing on our relationship to existing forms of insurgent self-organization can provide a counterweight to both reformist managerialism and radical impotence.
\n\nWhile Stop the Sweeps used activist tactics, we did so while understanding the insurgency of the camps as primary, rather than our own activity. Faced with the practical question of how to join forces with the camps and mount a defense against sweeps, we recruited and mobilized from within activist milieus, and we used activist tactics such as creating media, pushing limited demands (but not policy), rallies, home and office demos, and call-ins as part of campaigns against specific targets. Similarly, after Abbott opened what eventually became Camp Esperanza, we maintained an early presence to build relationships, trace the fault lines, and conspire with the residents to undermine this new form of management. When the COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis, we participated in shaping the camp support infrastructure that filled this gap, temporarily helping sustain the camps while developing new forms of collaboration with them. But we did so with a determination to bolster the defense of the camps, not seeing these things as ends in themselves, nor claiming to “organize” the homeless or integrate the camps or their residents into the terrain of political representation.
\n\nNow, on the other side of this movement arc, we feel it is important to re-articulate this position, which may have been forgotten amid the frenzy of service-oriented mutual aid, activist infighting, and reacting to our enemies’ offensives.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/8.jpg\")
Governor Greg Abbott, scumbag.
\nInformed by the tactical sensibility emerging through the last two decades of struggle—the port shutdowns during Occupy, the highway takeovers during Black Lives Matter protests, the targeting of ICE and prison contractors, and other struggles that we have participated in or learned from—Stop the Sweeps understood power as a question of infrastructure and logistics. Decision-making bodies are largely empty political theaters carrying out the will of dominant social forces—be those reactionary populist movements or factions of capitalists, non-profits, or police. Their emptiness makes demonstrations at the well-guarded halls of power ineffectual. The real power in this world is in the infrastructure that is used to administer and maintain this civilization; a decision to carry out sweeps can only be enforced if there are workers, trucks, and money that can be mobilized to that purpose. Infrastructures can be vulnerable to pressure, and this makes it a strategic site for potential pressure and direct action.
\n\nWe understood that City Hall and Abbott would never willingly stop the sweeps. Instead, once the state government started conducting sweeps in November 2019, we paid attention to who was conducting them. The sweeps were carried out by a work crew driving a few contractor trucks and overseen by a couple supervisors directly from the Texas Department of Transportation. The police were not actively removing people’s belongings; they served as a passive backup force that intervened only to suppress unrest or resistance. They were largely hands-off with us, allowing us to be in the camps as we filmed, harassed the work crew, and talked to residents. We noticed the same dynamic when the Austin Public Works Department carried out sweeps in November 2019 along other public easements with a different contractor’s name on the truck.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/40.jpg\")
A group of contract workers throw away belongings at a sweep under a highway overpass.
\nDigging through city and state contracts, we traced a whole web of contractors. We discovered that the city and state both contracted through WorkQuest, a central contracting agency offering services and products and employing disabled people. WorkQuest, in turn, contracted out to other agencies: EPSI for the state sweeps and Relief Enterprises for the city sweeps. Sometimes these subcontractors also recruited labor from temporary staffing agencies like Pacesetters or received people doing “community service” through Downtown Austin Community Court. Sometimes the work crews themselves consisted of other homeless people, though some we met ended up leaving because they couldn’t stand to participate in oppressing other people in the same position as them.
\n\nOnce we uncovered the contractors, we saw the WorkQuest contract as a strategic vulnerability. Our theory was that if there was enough pressure to make contractors back out or make the sweeps more costly, it would diminish the political will to carry them out. We hoped that if WorkQuest dropped out, it would impair both the City and State from doing sweeps. We identified the phone numbers of WorkQuest employees, the locations of offices, and the addresses of executives; we used these for targeted phone zaps, a home demo, and a guerrilla fliering action at the WorkQuest store. This strategy draws a lot from the “tertiary targeting” model used in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign and more recently in the Stop Cop City movement. While the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted our focus on WorkQuest, we learned months afterwards that they had dropped the contract in March 2020 due to our pressure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/19.jpg\")
A home demo.
\nUnfortunately, WorkQuest dropping the contract did not stop the sweeps. As the city government took over the sweeps in the fall of 2020, WorkQuest passed off the contract directly to Relief Enterprises; we had only removed the middleman. Relief Enterprises had fewer physical sites to target; we had little luck finding a truck lot where we could mobilize a blockade or some other collective action. The few locations we did find appeared to be shared with other businesses in industrial parks, and the vehicles appeared to be dispersed between a few sites rather than concentrated in a single lot. Much of our energy targeting them was directed into call-in campaigns to City Hall when their contract came up for renewal, or car demos targeting the Mayor and City Council members. Beyond the car demos, we lacked effective ways to mobilize groups of people offensively during the height of the pandemic, and our energy was tied up in other initiatives like the camp support network.
\n\nFrom 2020 to 2022, we succeeded in using these methods to win concessions that softened the sweeps. The authorities let people keep their tents and belongings, permitting them to name what was and was not trash and to remain in their camps during the sweeps; the City tried to frame them as progressive “clean-ups” to appease critics. While they continued throw away furniture, mattresses, structures, and temporarily unattended belongings—and we continued to push back on each of those fronts—these sweeps were a far cry from the early Texas Department of Transportation sweeps that forced people to move all their belongings across the highway or lose everything.
\n\nAll these advances were undone when Prop B, a reactionary referendum initiative spearheaded by local anti-homeless forces with Save Austin Now, reinstated the camping ban and the sweeps returned as a force of devastating displacement. Since we had tied up so much of our energy in pressuring City Council alongside initiatives like the camp support network, we had not built up the forces we needed to take the fight directly to the sweeps infrastructure once the political terrain was closed off to us. By the time Prop B came down, the movement was already declining, and it was too late to reorient towards a new strategic framework. When we got started, we had been critical of Homes Not Handcuffs for only pushing the policy front without building the capacity to defend that victory against the inevitable reactionary backlash. In our pursuit of political leverage on the sweeps contract, we fell into a similar trap: we had not built up the power to defend the gains we had made against an inevitable reaction in the political terrain.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/24.jpg\")
\nIn our experience, an infrastructural understanding of power also opened offensive paths for us to avoid getting locked into head-on, symmetrical conflicts with better-resourced adversaries. It does not usually make sense to attempt to meet our enemy’s repressive forces head on with greater numbers or force—whether in a defensive attempt to hold a space against a siege or an offensive attempt to besiege the guarded fortresses of our enemies (City Hall, the Capitol, downtown). While there are conditions under which such confrontations are strategic, in general, we have found that if a movement’s strategy is defined around pursuing those, this will exhaust the movement, incur defeats, and reduce it to largely reactive activity. An asymmetrical approach instead considers where our adversaries are weak, how to stretch them thin by going where they are unprepared, and finding pressure points that maximize impact—such as the infrastructure undergirding a project. This enables a movement to take the initiative, forces its adversaries to respond from a position of weakness, and creates the conditions to win victories and mobilize greater forces.
\n\nWe learned some of these lessons the hard way in camp defense. While the initial defense of the ARCH was inspiring for stopping a sweep head on, it also illustrated the difficult of repeating such a victory: our adversaries could come back at any time, and being ready to stop them on short notice would have required an unsustainable level of vigilance and capacity for rapid response. Similarly, the weekly schedule of the highway sweeps meant that one day’s victory could be swept away by the work crew’s return the next week. By pivoting to an asymmetrical conflict model, targeting WorkQuest with pressure at places we weren’t expected, we opened up new fronts and took the initiative, acting on our own schedule rather than responding to the sweeps schedule.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/12.jpg\")
The camp outside of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (right) and its late-night removal by city workers armed with a mechanical claw (left).
\nThis does not mean that movements should abandon defensive fights, but that we should shift our approach to them. Asymmetrical approaches de-emphasize holding terrain at all costs, while recognizing it as essential. Rather than an all-or-nothing fight, defending terrain becomes a question of maximizing the costs for our opponents, minimizing our own losses, increasing combativeness and offensive opportunities, and rebuilding or seizing new terrain after the siege. Even when our movement was smaller, our efforts were strongest when they balanced tactical, defensive retreats with counteroffensives against the infrastructure of the sweeps.
\n\nWe continued to maintain a presence at sweeps, where we aimed to maximize delays, build connections and courage to support resistance in the camps, and help people rebuild afterwards. We knew that the sweeps operated according to a tight schedule, and that substantial delays along their route would either force them to come back another day, delay a sweep until the following week, or impact their obligations to other contracts. We reasoned that any delays we could force might give some relief to those further down the schedule who would get passed over that week, and that delays would drain more money and labor out of the contract. We also helped people to replace the tents and other survival gear that they had lost in sweeps in order to minimize the impact on people’s lives and ensure that the camps could persist.
\n\nEmploying this strategy, we achieved a couple major victories when entire camps resisted the sweeps, refusing to move or harassing the sweeps crews to slow them down. Some of these moments of resistance emerged spontaneously; others only after sustained efforts building direct relationships that gave us a basis of trust and courage to act alongside camp residents. Based on internal emails from Public Works, we know that our presence was a major nuisance for them. Eventually, they cracked down on our ability to mess with the sweeps from within the camps by enforcing a “work zone” rule allowing them to arrest people for trespassing while a sweep was ongoing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/30.jpg\")
An early graphic used by Stop the Sweeps to orient new volunteers to the wide range of ways to engage a sweep.
\nBy the end of the sweeps defense movement cycle, many of these lessons had been forgotten or had not spread widely enough, or we simply lacked the capacity to act on them. We had lost the ability to put pressure on the infrastructure of the sweeps or to turn the conflict into an asymmetrical one rather than a head-on clash. By 2022, due to the enforcement of the work zone rules, sweeps watch crews were unable to do much more than bear witness to the suffering of others or help them move their belongings. At a moment when the movement was declining, some tried to mobilize larger groups to resist each sweep head on, but these groups never really materialized. Actions like the City Hall occupation, while politically important in other ways, remained focused on targeting the symbolic halls of power rather than the material infrastructure of the sweeps. There was one small appearance at the home of the Relief Enterprises CEO, but it was far less forceful than the 2020 home demo against WorkQuest.
\n\nWhile it likely would not have stopped the post-Prop B sweeps, it remains an open question how returning to an understanding of the infrastructural nature of power and a strategy of asymmetrical conflict might have opened new avenues for the movement when it was facing decline. What if sweeps watch didn’t just invite people to bear witness to devastation, but converted camp defense into highway blockades that stopped the circulatory system of the city? Such a strategy could have employed the car demo tactic as well. What if the occupation of City Hall had targeted the offices and homes of sweeps contractors, or other politically and economically important parts of the city beyond the trap of downtown?
\n\nThere are no guarantees, only possibilities and questions to bear in mind in future fights. But it is essential to recognize that for now, our enemies are much bigger and better equipped than us, and we are strongest when we target their weak points rather than being drawn into direct clashes.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/25.jpg\")
Posters left behind after a small 2021 home demo at the home of the CEO of Relief Enterprises, the contractor responsible for the sweeps since 2020.
\nOne of our hypotheses, tested and refined through our experience in Stop the Sweeps, is that what we call social movements can be better understood as an open field of forces, each engaged with others to various degrees in relationships of collaboration and contestation, affinity and hostility, coalition and competition. What we describe as a “movement” is an emergent culmination of the interplay of these forces, irreducible to any sum of its component parts. Distinct actors within this field might be understood as poles—rallying points around which cohere a set of ideas, strategies, and ways of acting. These poles exert forces within the field of the movement, attracting new people and connections, pushing back on others, and spreading or clashing with other ideas within the terrain. Some poles may be able to affect those around them through their actions, transmitting ideas or causing shifts in the field of possibilities; other poles may find themselves isolated or ineffective, unable to act on their own terms or influence others.
\n\nThis view of movements as a field of forces and polarities clarifies a few things. First, it directs our focus not just to what an individual or a group is but to what it can do—how it affects the field of the movement and others in it. This emphasis on doing can help us let go of anxieties around recruiting people to join our organizations, focusing us instead on ways to spread autonomous and militant ways of acting. Influential poles can generate powerful proposals, models, or invitations to act that spread across crews, organizations, and networks. Furthermore, we can better understand the lines of transmission between groups, factions, and ideologies in movements through this framework. Rather than perceiving distinct sects (as implied by the term sectarian), we can discern how the force exerted by a pole can overflow the boundaries of a particular organization, or how people and groups themselves can move between different poles of a movement through their activity.
\n\nUsing this framework, we can perceive and act upon the possibilities latent in open-ended situations. We can see how these situations emerge as organic reactions to flashpoints of oppressive force; we can grasp how a protest movement can reach a scale and intensity that escape the control of those who “organized” it to become more potent and infectious. Perceptive and strategic militants can find the openings in such moments to contribute in ways that help to shape the outcome—forging new relationships, advancing new strategies or tactics, and enabling greater coordination, self-organization, or escalation. In Stop the Sweeps, this was one of our greatest strengths, whether we were engaging with a sweep, the waves of activity in the course of the George Floyd Uprising, the Abbott encampments and city COVID hotels, or rallies and occupations initiated by other groups.
\n\nStop the Sweeps emerged to fill a gap in the existing movement. While the Homes Not Handcuffs (HnH) coalition had secured the legislative victory of repealing the camping ban, they had failed to build the political force necessary to defend their win. So, when the city government responded to a wave of reaction a few months later by sweeping the ARCH at the same time that the state government cracked down with sweeps under the highway, the non-profit coalition was caught flat-footed. They scheduled a meeting at Street Forum the weekend before the sweeps to plan a response that would focus on legal observing, documentation, media campaigns, and continued legislative advocacy. The non-profit coalition kept most of its focus on Abbott’s exterminationist rhetoric, drawing no attention to the city’s or NGO’s use of sweeps to control the unhoused.
\n\nThe cell that became Stop the Sweeps began as a group of friends who started showing up in the mornings at the camp outside the ARCH in anticipation of the sweep. The timing of these sweeps was left vague and constantly delayed; but keeping this rhythm for two weeks led to a series of connections with people at that camp and some strategic conversations among the handful of us. When the announcement finally came that the ARCH sweep would occur on the same day as Abbott’s sweep of the camps under the highway, we had already laid the groundwork for launching Stop the Sweeps.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/18.jpg\")
A Homes Not Handcuffs rally at the Texas Governor’s Mansion in 2019, protesting Abbott’s threats to sweep camps.
\nWhen we attended the Homes Not Handcuffs response meeting and noticed that their plan did not include any attention on the sweeps at the ARCH, nor plans for direct resistance to the sweeps, we decided to break out into our own group adjacent to their meeting. At that meeting, we developed our own plan to mobilize a combative presence at the ARCH. While we could not stretch ourselves to mobilize on multiple fronts, we retained some presence at the highway sweeps to support any organic resistance to them. We took the name Stop the Sweeps—both a demand and a form of action—and put out our own call to action on our nascent socials.
\n\nRather than attempting to convince the HnH coalition to adopt a more confrontational strategy (or calling them out for their failure to do so), we identified an opening in the movement where we could act and filled it. We sidestepped direct conflict with the non-profit wing of the movement in favor of opening up space for autonomous action alongside the non-profit’s strategy. Seizing the opportunity to mobilize where the rest of the movement did not have a presence was advantageous in this regard, and helped avoid conflicts over “hijacking” or about escalating beyond the risk tolerance of HnH. Similarly, while those of us at the highway camps communicated with HnH forces on the ground, we made separate decisions to support unhoused people planning to resist the sweeps while the others focused on their strategy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/29.jpg\")
\nMaking our own plan enabled us to connect with other scattered forces, both within and outside the movement, that had been looking for more combative forms of engagement. In the days leading up to the ARCH sweep, we connected with members of the DSA-LSC who were involved in HnH and hungry to employ direct action tactics against the sweeps. They were able to leverage some of the contact lists that the coalition had not utilized, using email blasts and phone banking to turn people out to the ARCH. Through our existing connections, we were also able to pull in friends from anti-fascist and anti-police organizing.
\n\nConsequently, a small group without its own base was able to bring together about thirty people on a Monday. We temporarily prevented the destruction of the camp at the ARCH—at least, until they came back at 4 am.
\n\nFrom its inception, Stop the Sweeps existed in this delicate balance between maintaining connections to other actors in the movement and acting on our own terms. We attended the meetings that Homes Not Handcuffs hosted and maintained lines of communication with people in those groups; at the same time, we planned our own ways to engage on the ground, created our own narrative, and called our own actions. Calling our own action at the sweep that Homes Not Handcuffs had decided not to respond to was one example of this; mobilizing to support unhoused people who planned to resist the sweeps under the highways was another.
\n\nHomes Not Handcuffs held one more meeting after the sweeps started. We attended and made up most of the “sweeps defense” breakout group; the other two groups were focused on policy advocacy around criminalization and housing. We ultimately absorbed the sweeps defense group into our efforts; we later learned that the other groups never got off the ground after that meeting. The consolidation of this pole and its rapid growth gave us the momentum to transition into confronting the Texas Department of Transportation’s weekly sweep schedule after November 4. As the only group still actively following, resisting, and shaping the narrative around the sweeps, we were able to shift the movement towards a more radical position.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/31.jpg\")
Mercenaries destroying the homes of the houseless.
\nA few months into our work together, we had started to develop relationships with a wider range of groups. Seeking to increase the coordination and strategic intelligence of the movement, we initiated a closed assembly called The Hive. We framed it as an assembly that we were curating to be focused on shared action and reflection, explicitly not a decision-making space. The space was organized around three central principles: priority to grassroots, autonomous groups over non-profit and political organizations; a commitment to not undermining the work of other groups; and a commitment to not collaborating with the police against other wings of the movement. This last principle was intentionally crafted to make space for groups organized at state-run camps, which navigated complex relationships with the police and security that governed them, while holding a line to insulate the rest of the movement.
\n\nThe Hive brought together a wide range of factions including non-profits, self-organized homeless collectives, the street newspaper, DSA, mutual aid groups, tenant organizers, and harm reduction groups. It served as a venue for communication and cross-pollination across different groups and fronts of the struggle. At various points, the assembly grappled with questions related to squatting and takeover schemes, pushing back against policing in the COVID hotels, and forming locally-rooted support and defense groups for camps. Many of the relationships that formed through this assembly came to form the initial core of the Camp Support network.
\n\nBuilding on the relationships formed in the Hive, we were positioned to bring groups together to build out the Camp Support mutual aid network after existing social services shut down following the outbreak of COVID-19. One comrade connected us with a church kitchen; the local Food Not Bombs chapter provided know-how and a network of cooks to start sending out meals. As we met more groups after the George Floyd Uprising, we were able to help them connect to this work in addition to sweeps watch, bringing together a dozen or so small organizations offering everything from harm reduction to resources for sex workers. At first, the success of this network underlined the painfully slow response of the city government to the public health crisis.
\n\nThis was complicated when city resources finally caught up months into the pandemic and approached the network about using our volunteers to shuttle its prepared meals. The network accepted this deal, opting to use them as we pleased and to build what we hoped would be fighting relationships with camp residents. This part of the mutual aid work remained underdeveloped; the volunteers who brought food only showed up to fight alongside people at sweeps on rare occasions. Camp support coordinators did use their access to city food program meetings to pester city bureaucrats into putting pressure on the agencies running sweeps, and this was one prong of a successful effort to defeat most of the sweeps during the initial months of the pandemic.
\n\nOur ability to act decisively and maintain a wide range of complex relationships with other formations depended in large part on the high degree of trust and shared context within the core group of Stop the Sweeps, which emerged from our long-term relationships and experience throwing down together. The strong connections among our core group enabled us to take bold action and gave us the emotional resilience to engage in more complicated coalitional relationships with tact and grace. We had space to voice and think through critiques of other formations and strategies and to reflect on our relationships to other groups despite our differences. This helped release pressure and avoid unnecessary direct conflict.
\n\nAs time went on and some of our initial crew stepped back, we started to bring in new people we met through our activity. We developed a set of principles and a process for onboarding people, emphasizing experience working together and a sensibility that resonated with our principles and strategy. We avoided rushing to recruit people, and emphasized the many ways to get involved in specific forms of activity that did not require formally joining Stop the Sweeps—such as planning specific actions, coming to the Hive, and coordinating around sweeps defense. This process helped to expand our crew and bring in new energy at crucial moments, especially when the movement was beginning to scale up and we encountered a number of other fellow travelers.
\n\nThis also meant that the group composition slowly shifted so that there were fewer long-term, high-context relationships in the group. Eventually, many of us only knew each other from the movement against sweeps. As the latter phases of the movement brought more intense conflicts and we encountered new limits, members of our crew responded differently to these situations. Some members pushed to engage more directly in the intra-movement conflicts, such as by making demands of Austin Mutual Aid (AMA).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/23.jpg\")
Unhoused people and activists rally at an encampment set up at City Hall by Little Petal Alliance in response to the passage of the new camping ban.
\nWhen Little Petal Alliance (LPA) launched an occupation at City Hall in response to Prop B, our group was divided in new ways. Some members saw the occupation as an open-ended situation full of potential and self-organization that exceeded any one group, and wanted to engage with it; others were wary due to a combination of tactical critiques and legitimate criticisms of the harmful and opportunistic behaviors of members of LPA. When the camping ban ushered in the demolition of camps, some members pushed for more urgent activity and took out their frustrations on other participants in the movement. Most devastatingly, this led to a split with one of the unhoused activists who was a founding member. Our experience demonstrates the need to remain attuned to how the changing composition of a group over time, alongside shifting movement conditions, can change the forms of trust and collaboration that are possible, even if it nominally remains organized around the same principles and strategy.
\n\nUnderstanding our activity in terms of the constitution of poles allows us to evaluate our relationships with other formations on the basis of what they make possible or foreclose. Relationships with other groups—even those with whom we have significant differences when it comes to our orientation towards demands, reform, the state, or other institutions—can open up opportunities to leverage information, increase our ability to circulate proposals and influence other factions of the movement, and produce openings for creative forms of activity. If we understand the porous, shifting, open-ended nature of all groups, we can see how they might transform in the course of a movement. Cultivating relationships with groups that work with the state while maintaining our own irreducible antagonism towards it can create new tensions, reshaping the demands of other wings of the movement and making it more difficult for the authorities to divide a movement into those they can co-opt and those they can repress.
\n\nThe central consideration in such relationships is to keep the initiative and always maintain autonomy. Relationships can also have the effect of stifling possibilities rather than generating them; we can stifle our own initiatives for fear of upsetting other factions, end up tailing other formations, or become absorbed in the efforts of other groups. Maintaining the initiative within the field of movement polarity moves us away from the habit of merely critiquing other groups’ activities that we disagree with, so that we focus instead on how to develop and spread our own ideas and models for action as we collaborate and compete with others for influence.
\n\nThese relationships require minimum standards of respect. Active hostility or denouncements, undermining others’ efforts, collaborating with the state against other wings of the movement, or acting as an extension of state, politician, or capitalist influence over the movement often precludes such relationships. Such dynamics have often defined the relationship between autonomous groups and other factions of movements, whether reformist, non-profit, or authoritarian left. However, it is not inevitable that these relationships must always be antagonistic. An understanding of movement polarity can identify the avenues for collaboration beyond simplistic ideological categories, so that autonomous groups can avoid becoming trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict with everyone else.
\n\nOur relationships with Homes Not Handcuffs enabled us to receive and leverage certain forms of information regarding the motivations of city council members and the dynamics between them, upcoming meeting items and policy changes, and pressure points and information about the effects of our actions on the departments enacting the sweeps. We were also able to produce scandals as a means of shaping the demands that HnH brought to City Council, which enabled us to exert influence on the negotiations without participating in them. At the same time, we were able to continue agitating against the city departments and social service providers that the coalition negotiated with.
\n\nThis framework also helped us to locate our work in this particular campaign in relation to the broader radical milieu in Austin. In 2019, the organizing terrain was complicated for autonomous organizers. Most organizing was dominated by non-profit organizations, the vast majority of which were hostile to more radical activity. There was a range of progressive non-profit and community advocacy organizations that had more radical political ideas, but whose activity was mostly oriented around policy advocacy and rallies at City Hall. Within the radical milieu, the Maoist milieu surrounding Red Guards Austin (RGA) had absorbed many of the people looking for more militant activity who were dissatisfied with the community organizer scene. As a consequence of sectarian conflict with other movement organizations, abusive authoritarian dynamics, and reckless disregard for their members’ well-being, Red Guards Austin had poisoned the well for militant activity. It was hard to engage in militant organizing, criticize non-profits, or even to wear a mask without being accused of being part of Red Guards.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/17.jpg\")
An encampment at City Hall.
\nPart of our goal was to use our activity in Stop the Sweeps to open the field for more activity beyond the influence of the non-profit organizations and the Maoists. We developed a way of acting that emphasized autonomous principles without explicitly flagging ourselves as anarchists. We experimented with ways to push the tactical repertoire of the movement without entering into direct conflict with other factions or alienating potential collaborators. Many of us were intimately familiar with the caustic effect that the Maoists specifically had on movements that they entered and knew that we could not maintain our autonomy or initiative while working with them. We also knew that they thrived on direct conflict and polemics against other groups. So when they made attempts to gain inroads into the movement, we simply ignored them and did our own thing.
\n\nThere is a long history of conflict between the autonomous factions of various movements and those oriented towards reformist negotiations or party organization building. In some cases, the strategies of autonomous militants contribute to this dynamic, particularly when they create a situation in which the contradictions between groups are resolved through a simple sorting of ideological or tactical alignments. Call-outs and polemics, direct conflict with reformist or “less militant” factions of a movement, and filtering all political allegiances through a rigid ideological filter can mirror liberal denunciations, collaboration with the state, and peace policing.
\n\nIdeally, the framework of movement polarity offers an experimental path beyond this impasse, though it can challenge assumptions about the role of ideology. How correct our critiques are will make no difference if they only result in us constructing isolated cliques instead of developing the ability to intervene in complex situations. Our hypothesis is that positioning ourselves within these contradictions rather than forcing them towards a simple resolution can open up generative possibilities. We hope others will test and refine this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/15.jpg\")
\nWe were media savvy yet media critical. This is rare in a milieu divided between anarchists who oppose any engagement with media on principle and anarchists whose primary form of communication is the Instagram-Infographic-Industrial-Complex.
\n\nWe used social media as a tool to develop our own narrative and analysis of the sweeps. Every week, we would get practice writing reports on the previous week’s sweeps—drawing attention to their cruelty and to the growth of the resistance. This regular rhythm helped us document the sweeps at a point when most of the media coverage had dried up along with the attention of the larger organizations. As our posts spread—sometimes, ironically, due to reactionary hate comments boosting our performance in the algorithm—we were able to invite more people to join us in sweeps watch. For those who wouldn’t or couldn’t join, combining these posts with calls for phone and email blasts offered ways to enable spectators to participate.
\n\nAt the same time, we strategically engaged traditional news outlets. We had access to some media contacts thanks to Homes Not Handcuffs, and we mobilized a number of these outlets to cover the ARCH sweep and create political pressure around it. In the process, we developed a number of relatively friendly media connections who helped to circulate our narrative and occasionally follow up on reports and questions that helped to inform our campaigns.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/28.jpg\")
Austin police move to arrest a homeless Stop the Sweeps member who set up a protest tent outside of the downtown homeless shelter after the camp there was evicted.
\nAt a certain point, we were able to use an offensive media strategy to produce scandal. Whenever we caught the sweeps crew on camera in an egregious act—throwing out water during the height of summer, destroying camping supplies in violation of their stated “clean-up” policies, or harassing and threatening sweeps watch volunteers—we could circulate the media and draw negative attention. Sometimes, this alone was enough to exert pressure on the higher-ups, and we saw the crews act differently on subsequent sweeps.
\n\nSometimes, we took this further. We would generate a scandal, then tap one of our friendly media contacts to reach out to the relevant city department or company for comment. The department, trying to maintain public legitimacy, would make some minor concession to something we were demanding. The journalist would tweet out this response and, without waiting for a formal article, we would seize on this as new “policy.” Then we would launch a new set of demands, always pushing the envelope. We did not treat these demands as points of negotiation, but as discursive trenches—as soon as our enemies made a concession, we would dig new a new trench to keep pushing them further, ensuring they remained on the back foot. Combined with phone zaps and on-the-ground resistance, this approach de-fanged the sweeps for most of 2020.
\n\nWhether we were publishing our own reports or engaging with journalists, our strength came from developing our own strategy for engaging each of these media forms rather than letting them impose their logic on us. We used social media to circulate report-backs, but we avoided using it for discourse or petty conflict; we did not subordinate our political activities to the pursuit of followers or engagement. Similarly, we used corporate media to circulate our analysis and to produce scandals for our opponents while refusing to get mired in concerns about optics or respectability. Releasing a press release for a home demo was a way of seeking publicity on our own terms. We intentionally avoided news stations that we knew were hostile; we did not fetishize talking to media as an end in itself.
\n\nAll media and communication tools contain their own internal logic. If we don’t intentionally impose our own logic on them, they will impose their logic on us. Our movements already recognize how corporate media represent specific class interests. We are starting to become aware of how social media do the same—from outright censorship to the ways that algorithms privilege certain forms of interaction while suppressing others, thereby shaping how we think, act, and relate.
\n\nThis became especially clear to us as we reflected on one of our most-used tools, the Signal chat.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/1.jpg\")
What happens when all organizing moves to Signal?
\nEarly on in our campaign, we used Signal chats in limited ways. We communicated via one core chat for the Stop the Sweeps crew. Some of us maintained a small text blast system that we would plug new contacts into; we used this system to announce upcoming sweeps and bring people out to sweeps watch. We would follow up with them in direct messages, then orient them on the ground. This worked well enough until one week, the person bottom-lining follow-up fell ill. To streamline communication, they made a Signal chat including all the people who would be coming out for sweeps watch that day so we could coordinate with each other. Over the next few weeks, this pattern of starting coordination-focused group chats for sweeps days continued until we created a general sweeps watch chat, where a growing layer of participants from outside the core group could share information and self-organize breakout chats for specific sweeps.
\n\nThe sweeps watch Signal chat became the movement’s defining platform. As we encountered new allies and plugged them into sweeps defense, they would be added to this chat. The chat took on a life of its own, with people announcing upcoming sweeps and self-organizing separate chats for each week’s sweeps. At first, most people in the chat probably knew most other people in it, or else came to know them by participating in sweeps watch. The conversations were mostly limited to sweeps-related planning. The big Signal chat enabled us to scale up our organizing by taking the labor of follow-up and orientation off our hands: someone new could connect with other people on the ground and get the lay of the land from whatever experienced people were there. Creating another large channel to coordinate camp support—complete with its own array of breakout chats related to specific projects, infrastructure, and camps—increased the movement’s capacity to scale.
\n\nIf you’ve been running in activist circles long enough, you know where this is headed.
\n\nAt some point, the Signal chats hit a crucial turning point. They had expanded in size, in part due to the ballooning camp support network that was bringing new people into sweeps watch. By that time, a large number of the participants had not met each other. The expansion of the movement ecosystem meant people in each chat were likely involved in a number of other projects, with varying degrees of affinity or tension with other groups in the ecosystem. While this communication system worked for a while, it began to break down around the same time that the movement began to hit other limits.
\n\nThe big chats slowly lost their focus on coordination as people started to use them as discussion forums in which to debate strategy and tactics. At times, a small group of people would engage in lengthy discussion in the chats, with dozens of others as a captive audience. This became particularly fraught in moments of emotional intensity (for example, immediately after a sweep)—especially when the parties in conflict did not know each other or already had existing tensions. Over time, other movement conflicts were imported into the chat, as well. By the time the camping ban came down, these dynamics had already drained collective engagement in the big chats. Consequently, the movement fragmented as economic normalcy was imposed at the conclusion of the lockdown.
\n\nThe Signal chat is a useful tool, but like other communication platforms, it tends to impose its own logic. As a Signal chat grows, two things happen. First, the chats can generate too much noise to be helpful. High-traffic conversations among dozens of participants quickly add up to hundreds of messages, especially if there are not shared norms regarding what sort of information belongs in the channel. Second, the levels of trust and vulnerability decrease as fewer of the participants are connected by real relationships. This compounds with the way that tone, body language, and other aspects of communication are lost via text—so that when conflict takes place, it occurs without a basis for trust, leading to escalating tension and hurt feelings.
\n\nIn our experience, Signal chats were most useful when organized around a defined purpose, usually limited to coordinating and sharing information. Ideally big, chats should keep chatter to a minimum, making space for deeper coordination or planning conversations in smaller breakout chats, such as the date-specific sweeps watch chats. Strategic debates and conflicts should be worked out in small groups or private chats between comrades engaging in good faith. Higher-stakes emotional conversations or strategic debates should ideally take place in person or at least on a call, to maximize the extent to which the participants can be emotionally present and engage in a full spectrum of communication. It may be helpful to set a precedent for moderating and maintaining norms in a chat early on to ensure that chats do not devolve into meetings or amorphous discussion forums. Because we had not set that precedent at the outset, it was difficult for us to intervene as moderators.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/11.jpg\")
Sweeps watch.
\nThese are ways to adjust how we use the tool; but we should also reduce our dependence on the tool. If a Signal chat is frequently being overwhelmed with other kinds of conversation, that indicates a need for additional containers. In our experience, while there were lots of meetings to deal with the week-to-week activities, our movement had few containers for broader reflection or debate, few release valves for tensions and conflict. Building these missing components into our movements is essential—otherwise, what you repress will eventually burst into the chat in explosive ways.
\n\nSome of these things are more feasible with Signal now. Signal has since added Admin roles and permissions, which enable better moderation and the creation of announcement-only channels. Movements may benefit from centering dedicated announcement-only channels in order to ensure that a broad range of participants receive the most essential updates. Letting smaller chats handle planning, coordination, and strategy can create more intentional and sustainable avenues for those conversations.
\n\nOn the other hand, it can inhibit a movement to over-correct and impose limits too early. If your organizing channels consist of small chats without much activity, it’s not helpful to impose rules to limit activity—and rather than reducing message quantity, too many breakout channels containing the same five people will only gratuitously inflate the number chats. While it eventually limited us, for a time, the open Signal chat enabled us to grow. The best thing is to anticipate the limits and develop plans for addressing them as you reach them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/14.jpg\")
Home: don’t steal.
\nThe last year or two of the camp support movement was defined by conflicts around money. This mirrored similar conflicts elsewhere around the country between 2020 and 2022. Questions about who raised money and what they used it for became divisive, provoking inflammatory conflicts that dissolved organizations, even entire movements. We want to reflect on our experiences for the next time these questions resurface and offer some thoughts for movements elsewhere to consider as well.
\n\nIn the early weeks of Stop the Sweeps, we carried out limited goal-oriented fundraising, chiefly to replace tents, sleeping bags, and other essential survival gear lost in the sweeps. This was strategic as well as ethical: replenishing these supplies helped maintain the camps and thwart the goal of the sweeps. Our largest fundraising effort was a $3000 GoFundMe to buy 100 tents. The member with keys to the GoFundMe tracked itemized withdrawals and purchases. Since the goals were clear and the stakes relatively low, we were able to make most decisions easily over Signal chats, filling time-sensitive needs for shelter after each sweep. Most discussions focused on which stores to purchase from. Occasionally, we also fundraised for bail and legal funds for friends who were arrested resisting the sweeps. Had we expanded the scope of our fundraising, made larger purchases, or made fundraising a core facet of our organizing strategy, we might have needed a different container for financial decisions.
\n\nMoney played a bigger and more controversial role in the camp support movement, which from its early days networked together a number of different initiatives around shared infrastructure, such as collective kitchens that relied on various organizations for their distribution network. One group, named Austin Mutual Aid (AMA), began to form a fundraising apparatus for this network. Its founder, Bobby Cooper, was a contentious figure; a white man from New York who had organized in Occupy Sandy, his ego and abrasive personality caused some tensions in this network. For the most part, the network was big enough and Austin Mutual Aid small enough that people could hold them at a distance, only approaching them for funds around things like water in the summer or cold-weather gear in the winter.
\n\nThings changed with Winter Storm Uri in 2021. AMA had had the forethought to claim a name primed for search engine optimization. As millions around the country turned their attention to supporting groups in Texas, AMA’s winter fundraiser gained mainstream attention—going so far as to be shared by cast members of Queer Eye. It ballooned to some $3 million, and AMA gained the national media spotlight as the face of mutual aid in Austin. Suddenly, a group that had been marginal and annoying was central to the movement. This inflamed the existing tensions and resentments, adding stakes on the scale of millions of dollars.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/10.jpg\")
Volunteers sort through clothes at an ad-hoc Austin mutual aid donation center during Winter Storm Uri.
\nThe following months saw protracted conflicts over the allocation of this money, the handling of the Winter Storm response in general, and AMA’s role in relation to the rest of the movement. The conflict crossed Signal threads, Instagram slide decks, and many-hours-long Zoom and Jitsi calls. Probably every organization in the movement had at least one meeting about AMA, and many participated in AMA’s “community meeting” to decide how to distribute the money. Among other things, people accused AMA of taking credit for work that was largely carried out by other groups, raising money and gatekeeping access to it, white saviorism, charity-style work, using other groups’ media for their own fundraising, and not using the funds to offer people long-term housing, whether in the hotels that were taken over during the freeze or in regular apartments.
\n\nStop the Sweeps participated in some of these conflicts, including private criticisms of AMA, social media call-outs, and hour-long Zoom calls. How might we have approached those conflicts differently? How could future movements avoid or mitigate them?
\n\nThere was certainly truth to the criticisms of AMA. There was a crucial moment when AMA’s fundraising far exceeded what they had hoped to raise or had plans for. That could have been a good time to pause their fundraiser and direct potential donors to some of the other projects that were raising funds, like the Jordan’s Place police-free autonomous zone established by the Black revolutionary organization 400+1 in East Austin during the 2021 winter storm. Instead, AMA leaned into the spotlight, taking media appearances, speaking on behalf of the movement, and claiming others’ work.
\n\nAMA’s blunders should serve as a warning to any group that might accidentally stumble into large sums of money—as a number of pre-existing bail funds and mutual aid projects did in 2020—to take a cautious and disciplined approach to finances. Organize fundraisers with clear plans for how much you hope to raise and how you will use it. While it can be great to exceed goals, at a certain scale, raising more money than anticipated can create confusion, liability, and conflict. It may be better to shut down a fundraiser once it has exceeded its goal and direct people to other groups. This can insulate your crew from money conflicts, redistribute resources in crucial ways, and help build goodwill with the broader movement.
\n\nRegardless of who raises them, large sums of money can generate conflict and create liability. While AMA was a particularly controversial organization, we doubt that any organization that ended up in that position would have avoided criticism and conflict. Controlling large amounts of money and attention inevitably stokes resentment, jealousy, and political factionalism. Even if a group has a solid plan for raising and using large amounts of money, and even if that group maintains good relations and collaboration with other factions of the movement, the existence of that fundraising capacity can give rise to all sorts of friction. The project you are funding will be criticized: it’s not militant, not mutual aid, not strategic, not sustainable, not democratic enough, it doesn’t center the right groups, it’s not safe enough, not organized enough. Not all of this critique will be in good faith; some of it will simply be a cover for interpersonal or factional competition.
\n\nWe should be generous and graceful in our criticisms of groups that stumble into money. While we should generate and share good-faith political critiques of the decisions that they make, moralizing and attacks often do not help anyone. Groups are not necessarily enemies or threats to a movement because they don’t use money in the ways that we think they should or distribute it through the process we consider most just. Many such groups are simply figuring out a complicated situation as they go, the same way we would in their shoes.
\n\nIf we aim to work in movements that involve a wide range of political and strategic orientations, we will have to accept diverging perspectives on big questions. Unnecessarily escalating political conflicts into movement-wide fractures consumes a disproportionate amount of everyone’s energy, sapping it from more fruitful activities. When we identify the political differences that distinguish us from another group, those offer ripe ground for launching new projects, leading by example, and acting on our own terms, rather than simply criticizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/32.jpg\")
Winter Storm Uri in 2021.
\nTo understand the rapid growth of the movement against sweeps and its ultimate collapse, it is helpful to think of movements as always running up against and struggling to transcend particular limits. Focusing on the limits of movements moves us from a framework that externalizes our problems (blaming them on liberals, non-profits, the state, the police, sectarians, authoritarians, rival factions) to a framework that approaches our problems chiefly as internal, organizational questions. If our movements will inevitably confront co-optation, repression, or fragmentation, we should look inward to understand what aspects of our strategy make us vulnerable to these and experiment with ways to become capable of overcoming them.
\n\nThe effectiveness of any tactic is determined by context. This includes considerations such as whether it brings new people into the movement, whether the movement can sustain the tactic, and how prepared our enemies are to mitigate its effectiveness. The same tactic repeated in a different context, or even at a different point in the same movement, can produce completely different results. Innovation and experimentation can help overcome limits related to tactics, while fetishizing or stigmatizing tactics can keep a movement stuck in ineffective repetition.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/26.jpg\")
Sweeps watchers try to save a tent during a sweep off Riverside Drive in 2019. This sweep was one of our early victories; we stalled the crew for hours and ultimately saved the camp.
\nTranscending the limits of sweeps watch by reorienting towards camp support helped us expand the movement at a crucial moment. For the first few months, the rhythm of sweeps watch helped us connect to people in the camps, plug people into a concrete activity, gather information about the contractors, gain experience in confrontational action, and make a political scandal out of the sweeps. Over time, we began to hit new limits, as we could not add numbers fast enough to keep up with the sweeps and faced arrests as a consequence of new work zone rules. Before COVID-19 hit, we had already begun to imagine alternative ways to approach sweeps watch, such as creating locally-based networks in the neighborhoods near particular camps.
\n\nThe switch to camp support activated a new, broader network of people and activities. People built consistent relationships with the specific camps they supported, which enabled them to report back on camp needs and any sweeps announcements. This brought more people into sweeps defense generally, so that our smaller group’s capacity wasn’t always stretched to its limit. Camp support also overcame a barrier to using the old sweeps defense model during the pandemic: when traveling between the camps posed the risk of inter-camp viral transmission, the distributed defense model helped mitigate that threat. As camp support grew, so did our capacity to mobilize people against the sweeps through sweeps defense, phone zaps, and car demos. This network also leaped into action with the George Floyd Rebellion. One of the main battlegrounds of the rebellion in Austin was in front of APD headquarters, where protestors shared the space with a camp under the highway overpass at I-35 and 7th Street. After the height of the uprising, many individuals and new groups joined the network, turning to mutual aid work as a continuation of the uprising, sometimes at the same location.
\n\nTactics that generate potential at one time can themselves become limits. This becomes clear when we reflect on the missed opportunities of “mutual aid.” Camp support arose at a critical moment when existing social services had shut down due to the pandemic, leaving many on the street without consistent access to food and other necessities. Filling this gap, mutual aid was a way of securing the survival of the camps; this hearkens back to some of the forms of mutual aid as communal care and support that precede colonialism and capitalism, and which oppressed and exploited peoples have used to survive within them. During the first phase of the pandemic, the Camp Support network basically supplanted the city’s disaster response efforts. This recurred when the network mobilized to supply and shelter dozens of people during Winter Storm Uri, filling in where the city government did nothing. In both cases, the network’s efforts compelled the city to offer access to some food program meetings and to ask to use the network to deliver its prepared meals. The network made use of these resources, nominally towards its own ends.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/9.jpg\")
Supplies stored in an Austin Mutual Aid donation center after Winter Storm Uri.
\nThese efforts were closely tied to confrontational movement activity, as they were connected to sweeps defense, the rent strike movement of the early pandemic, and the George Floyd Rebellion; consequently, they were also part of a broader strategic framework. By the end of 2021, however, something had changed. The initial political context of camp support had been forgotten. Moralistic rhetoric framed mutual aid as a radical act unto itself, putting it above criticism and turning it into an obligation. This erased the need for mutual aid to be connected to other confrontational political activity; the only purpose was to provide the most meals to the greatest number of people. At the same time, the conditions were changing: social services had resumed, making camp support food distribution less essential, and even wasteful in some cases. Yet to make an argument for focusing on something other than “mutual aid” was considered unthinkable.
\n\nWe suspect that our experiences with the fetishization of “mutual aid” were a fractal reflection of a national trend. For us, mutual aid is important as a political project, not a moral task. Camp support and food distribution are good, but whether they are worth the majority of our organizing efforts depends on the conditions we are acting in and what the results will be. We understood camp support as a way to deepen our relationships with the camps, seeing the meal as a chance to build a foundation for trust so as to collaborate in more militant sweep defense or combative activity around other issues. This framework is distinct from a social services model that treats service provision as the end goal. It demands that we evaluate how much energy mutual aid efforts take and whether they are worth pursuing at the expense of other tasks.
\n\nThis form of mutual aid also ran up against limits we can see in previous cycles of autonomous disaster response and mutual aid. In the initial window of a disaster, autonomous groups can effectively set up and sustain infrastructure to support large groups of people. While highly effective during this window of time, they are rarely able to translate this into a deeper crisis for the state or the economy, nor to undermine the inevitable reimposition of normalcy, organize new and enduring social relationships, or transform these efforts into sustainable and combative projects after the disaster recedes.
\n\nNotably, what people were calling mutual aid was decidedly not mutual; it was a largely one-directional, service-oriented model of activism. Early on, this emerged of necessity due to COVID-19 precautions, which limited our ability to build more collective relationships and gather with people. However, over time, this meant that the relationship between a camp support volunteer and a food insecure person in a camp was primarily defined by the giving and receiving of a meal. Sometimes, this relationship included other “case worker” services, such as help with medical services and public benefits—but that, also, failed to break the dynamic of service provider and recipient. Delivering food did not in itself generate deeper political relationships, enable shared struggle, or build the reciprocity that could grow into new kinds of social relationships and life-giving infrastructure.
\n\nAdditionally, this meant that very little of the infrastructure built for camp support could actually sustain the ones doing the work—instead, it wore out the small handful of people who coordinated most of the effort. The early growth of camp support was possible in large part due to the pandemic shutdown, with paused or remote work and increased benefits enabling large numbers of people to dedicate time to the efforts. By spring 2021, however, the slow reimposition of normalcy meant that benefits were drying up, life was getting more expensive, and more people had to go back to work, draining the network’s capacity. With most of the infrastructure geared towards outward-facing service provision, the mutual aid networks could not provide people the support they needed to stay engaged in the movement. In the slow decay of the mutual aid networks, we were neither living nor fighting.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/21.jpg\")
\nThis model of activism is ripe for cooptation because it is essentially similar to state or NGO social services—just horizontally organized and less well-funded. Without no political strategy beyond feeding as many people as possible, in the face of waning capacity due to changing economic conditions, it was difficult to justify refusing to collaborate with the city government or social service providers. While the radical wings of the movement decried these changes with radical rhetoric, there was no alternative strategic framework to illuminate the limits of the camp support model. Radical ideas do not sustain people in a movement, resources and infrastructure do—and the radical wing of the movement was largely competing with the state and the nonprofit-industrial complex on their home turf. The limitations of the camp support model set the stage for the cooptation of certain wings of the movement, with groups like AMA working with social service providers like ECHO and Little Petal Alliance forming the mobile outreach wing of Sunrise Church.
\n\nIf power is fundamentally determined by infrastructure, movements also confront infrastructural limits. What are the supply lines that move resources, the entry points that bring in new people, the sites of care that help reproduce the movement, the hubs where we can organize combative actions or spaces for reflection? What are their vulnerabilities, and how can our adversaries attack them? These may be direct attacks—raids, evictions, restrictions, regulation—or other issues, such as an economic shift that forces people to step back from a movement in order to resume earning money.
\n\nIf we accept that movements inevitably go through phases of growth and shrinkage, we can orient our strategies towards anticipating and responding to these moments. Movement growth can necessitate new organizing formats or infrastructure to accommodate new participants, lest they overload the existing channels; movement shrinkage also requires abandoning rigid practices to make room for new possibilities. In the growth phase of a movement, the key thing is to be flexible and decisive in order to seize opportunities to level up. During movement decline, it is important to make space for reflection and strategic reorientation, to be prepared to drop practices that are no longer effective or sustainable. A movement increasing its capacity during a growth phase feels very different from a movement contracting in its decline phase, even when the movement’s actual capacity is in fact greater in the latter case.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/20.jpg\")
A tent set up on the lawn of the WorkQuest CEO during a Stop the Sweeps home demo that took place at a time when the movement’s capacities were growing.
\nWhat could have helped us to surpass the limits we reached? In view of the camp support network’s ability to out-organize the city government in the early phase of crisis, how could we have used this position of power to undercut its legitimacy, make deeper connections with those we were supporting, reinvent social relationships via new experiments in organization, or build enduring infrastructure to enable collective survival? We can try out Phil Neel’s use of the concept of “competitive control,” a term used by military strategists to describe insurgencies that produce a base of support and an alternative geography of resistance by providing services and stability where the state has failed, often alongside efforts to destabilize the state. While this framework is derived from military thought and applied to a range of repressive forces like the Taliban, it can help us to consider how autonomous forces might build power in conditions of crisis and collapse.
\n\nWe can consider the efforts of 400+1 to establish an autonomous zone named Orisha Land during Winter Storm Uri as a source of inspiration. 400+1 was a federation and cadre organization oriented towards Black revolutionary autonomy that acted parallel to the camp support network, with some overlap, collaboration, and connection between the movements. During Winter Storm Uri, they declared an autonomous police-free zone called Orisha Land in the historically Black (but gentrifying) Rosewood neighborhood. They occupied a park to establish a resource hub and shelter for unhoused Black people. Renaming the park Jordan’s Place, after a Black man named Jordan Walton who was killed by APD, they maintained the occupation for a few weeks after the storm and broadcast proposals for transforming the park with gardens, community programming, and ambitious visions for shelter and housing.
\n\nThe city government ultimately cleared 400+1 out of the park in a repressive maneuver parallel to its recuperation of “mutual aid” groups. While the city government incorporated some aspects of the mutual aid network, using the groups as volunteer pools for future crisis responses such as running warming and cooling centers and distributing supplies, it repressed the militant faction that was contesting its legitimacy. This counterinsurgency strategy undoubtedly inflamed some of the later movement conflicts, as those who witnessed the eviction of Jordan’s Place while AMA aligned with the city government and service provider alliance directed their ire against the latter.
\n\n400+1 were not without their own limitations, some of which they shared with the broader movement. While they were capable of powerful gestures, these were often primarily spectacular, such as a live-streamed armed procession around the neighborhood to declare the autonomous zone. Some former members report that they did not manage to follow through on all of the promises that they made to people during the Winter Storm occupation. In 2022, the group saw an exodus of members in response to internal hierarches and conflicts over responses to harm within the organization.1 Still, without romanticizing this organization, we can evaluate the strategic direction they pursued: exploiting the crisis of the winter storm and the failure of the police to maintain order to contest the state’s control of territory and promote combative visions of neighborhood-based autonomy.
\n\nWhat similar experiments could the camp support and sweeps defense networks have undertaken? Attempts to occupy vacant housing, hotels, or restaurants in order to establish autonomous shelters, kitchens, or resource hubs would have served to contest the state and private property. Such gestures, even if unsuccessful, can erode state control and legitimacy during crises, while opening directions that counterbalance the threat of cooptation. Some of us discussed this and followed some of these threads over the course of the movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/16.jpg\")
The police and cooptation are two sides of the same coin.
\nThere were moments when this approach seemed possible, such as when the network was able to run a shelter out of a hotel during the winter storm with the acquiescence of the manager. There were loose discussions about turning this into an ongoing occupation after the storm, but the necessary combination of attention, resources, and opportunity never coalesced. Perhaps if some of these gestures had proliferated, they could have worked in tandem with the efforts in Orisha Land to heighten the crisis, creating an ecosystem of escalation that could have frustrated efforts to repress some initiatives while recuperating the others. Since winter storms have become a nearly annual occurrence in Austin, mutual aid groups could build the relationships and capacities over the year to launch such initiatives when the next one hits.
\n\nBeyond these offensive paths, the network also could have tried to create lasting autonomous infrastructure. Building infrastructure for outdoor mobile kitchens or collectively-managed kitchens that could operate long term without dependence on churches could have enabled the movement to grow and transform. Perhaps, as vaccination access made it possible to begin gathering with others again, the network’s activity could have shifted from constant meal delivery services to hosting community dinners at which food was not simply given but shared, fostering new kinds of social relationships while sustaining the people making the food and running the space. Such communal gathering spaces could host trainings, assemblies, and strategic conversations—so that sharing food would give rise to collective deliberation, forming the basis for future projects. Ambitious proposals like these could have flourished by making use of the money AMA doled out after the winter storm.
\n\nAnother path could have included shifting away from food delivery towards projects that addressed a need while simultaneously creating new relationships beyond the service provision model. Community gardens could have opened up new kinds of relationships with housed people supported by the mutual aid network; tending gardens offers a shared project to bring together activists and neighbors, which can help sustain households and open up relations of sharing with other neighbors. The vegetables grown could supply a broader network of food delivery and collective kitchens. A squatted garden in an occupied lot could offer space for unhoused people to camp and a rallying point to defend against gentrification.
\n\nWe can’t know what path the movement should have taken. Actualizing any of these possibilities would have involved messy, situational questions. We can keep these horizons and strategic directions in mind for the next time we enter a similar cycle of struggle, but seizing these opportunities depends less on analytical precision than on our ability to strategize and plan in the midst of an emerging situation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/4.jpg\")
Take the offensive.
\nThe dwindling phase of the movement from spring 2021 into 2022 was a perfect storm of movement shrinkage, fragmentation, conflict, and escalating state repression, with each factor intensifying the others in destructive feedback loops. Economic pressures compounded the cumulative effects of over a year of intense movement activity, contributing to a buildup of tension, trauma, and burnout. Unaddressed emotional dynamics exploded around high-stakes contention following the freeze, worsening previous resentments. Escalating conflicts accelerated the process of decline as they consumed the movement’s limited capacity, while others who were less invested simply withdrew. The escalation of repression with the passage of the city camping ban, the statewide camping ban, and the scorched earth sweeps over the summer increased the pressure on the movement in the midst of these dynamics. Heightened urgency and stakes caused an even greater explosion of conflict as people took out their frustrations about the movement’s limited capacity on each other. Decline produces conflict produces decline; repression causes decline and conflict, which amplify the effects of repression. A vicious cycle in which we were the main actors, with our enemies largely in the background.
\n\nIn addition to being our own worst enemies, our entire milieu was targeted by at least one bad actor using the moniker “Precious.” This person sought to map our traumas and fault lines, extract money, and exacerbate tensions. In the aftermath of the massive monetary windfall received by Austin Mutual Aid, a member of our collective began corresponding with the “Precious” Instagram account. “Precious” was later linked to a set of other accounts across social media that had targeted organizers across the South in Houston, New Orleans, and Atlanta using the same playbook of social mapping techniques and warped social justice language to call out organizations for various failings, real or invented. Several of these accounts were revealed to carry right-wing content if one scrolled back.
\n\nThis episode was later documented and reported on by others using a dossier created by members of the impacted organizations. We mention this here to emphasize that when trust is already low and strategic thinking compromised, other actors will find ways to exploit the opportunities that open up.
\n\nMovements in decline must learn to lose better. That means clearly assessing our capacities, the conditions we are facing, and what is and is not possible. This can be a heavy task. Admitting defeats means accepting the grave consequences that come with them; in 2021, it would have meant admitting that we were no longer in a position to stop the sweeps and all the devastation they inflicted. We must grieve these losses while discerning what we can preserve from a phase of struggle in order to position ourselves for the next fight, wherever it emerges. Seeking to do this would shift our focus from desperate attempts to throw what little we have at our enemy to identifying which relationships, infrastructure, practices, and actions can equip us to lay the groundwork for the next phase of struggle. That approach could enable us to return to an asymmetrical conflict framework and to avoid getting locked into losing direct confrontations with our enemies. Strategic retreats, regrouping, and reorientation can enable a movement to continue taking the initiative instead of merely reacting, in order to be better prepared to intervene in the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/6.jpg\")
Our enemies in orange.
\nStrategic thinking should not depend on the analytical, perceptive, or strategic capabilities of select individuals; it must become a political practice involving the entire movement. Even small gestures by crews and collectives articulating new principles and strategies can open a space for reflection. Collective infrastructure or practices can offer space for the movement to reflect on and adjust its activity, analyze changing landscapes, identify strategic opportunities and limitations, and release difficult emotions, tensions, and concerns. Such spaces can help build the strategic capabilities and emotional resilience of the movement. They can enable people to encounter each other across organizational or ideological lines, facilitating a circulation of ideas and strategies that can prevent the calcification of rigid ideological camps.
\n\nSuch efforts can take various forms. In our experience, they included articulating a set of political principles and strategic interventions through sweeps defense in order to constitute another pole in a movement; building working relationships with a wide spectrum of actors, from factions within encampments to activist groups, in order to enable collaboration and the circulation of tactical insights; and assembling The Hive as a space for coordination, reflection, and proposing new directions. In The Hive, in particular, we see both positive examples and missed opportunities.
\n\nThe relationships we built through the early Hive assemblies became the foundation of the early camp support network, which implemented some of the strategic conversations that had started in The Hive about neighborhood-based camp defense networks. This enabled the movement to level up at a critical moment. The Hive continued at a slow but steady rhythm through 2020, growing to include a wide range of factions at the height of the movement. However, by 2021, we had fallen out of practice. Assemblies saw less attendance as people focused on more urgent day-to-day work and meetings, and we put less effort into facilitating or reinvigorating them. By the time that the movement began to fracture and decline, there was no dedicated space or practiced rhythm for processing, addressing tensions, or big picture strategy discussions. Without dedicated infrastructure for facilitating these conversations, most organizations simply focused on the immediate needs of their particular project.
\n\nContinuing The Hive might not have resolved these problems. Strategic thinking is a habit that must be practiced and built into the rhythms of our work. We can offer a space for it, but that doesn’t guarantee that others in the movement will accept the invitation. If participants do not take it seriously, or cannot dedicate time to it due to the demands of their projects, the benefits will be limited. Nonetheless, such infrastructure has value even if only a minority of movement participants utilize it. It can still position them to make more effective interventions and proposals, holding open the window for strategic thinking and initiative. We must move from diagnosing our movement’s crises in the aftermath of their collapse to actively experimenting with ways to overcome their limits.
\n\nThose who participate in future cycles of struggle will continue to grapple with these questions. How can autonomous mutual aid efforts use the opening of a disaster and their ability to out-organize government responses to further undercut the legitimacy of the state and the economy? If we understand daily life within capitalist social relations as a constantly simmering crisis, how might projects that arise in reaction to acute crises (such as COVID-19 and the winter storm) maintain their initiative as the window of the disaster closes? How do we move away from a unidirectional, service-oriented model of activism to a model that generates new social relationships and communal infrastructure for meeting shared needs? How can mutual aid and crisis response enable a movement to take the offensive? There is no single right answer or right tactic; what counts is the ability to pose the necessary questions, stay creative, and take the initiative.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/38.jpg\")
This could be you.
\nWe believe the questions we grappled with will reappear because the struggle against sweeps is a harbinger of the struggles against precarity, dispossession, and displacement to come. We have already seen the encampments reappear in the refugee camps around Gaza and the solidarity encampments on college campuses in the United States—where, in Austin, some have experimented with using Signal to transcend some of the limits we discuss here. The camp is an image of the future—a future in which increased economic precarity, climate crises, wars, and state repression produce new waves of displacement and migration, and new forms of repression and managerial governance arise in response. Migrant caravans form tent cities at the border, facing the brutality of Border Patrol and police alongside the bureaucracy of the immigration system and resettlement programs; migrants bussed to New York end up circulating between camps and shelters, facing the brutality of sweeps and the bureaucracy of NGO management alongside a precarious working class that already cannot find sustainable employment or afford rising rents due to waves of gentrification.
\n\nAs these crises intensify, the question of insurgent survival appears on the horizon. We need to organize collective sustenance and dignity in the face of the dispossessions to come—and to do so in ways that will undermine and fragment the forces of the state and capital. To do so, we will have to act both from within and alongside the ranks of the precarious and dispossessed and to join forces with the forms of insurgent self-organization that emerge, such as encampments and migrant caravans. The question is how to simultaneously survive the crises inflicted by the prevailing order with dignity while throwing it into crisis in a way that enables us to explore new ways of living.
\n\n—Some former members of Stop the Sweeps ATX
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/25/5.jpg\")
\nThe successes, limits, and lessons of 400+1 are not our story to tell. We encourage our comrades who participated in that organization to publish their own reflections. ↩
\nIn the following analysis, we explore what we can expect from Donald Trump’s second term and how we can prepare to confront it. If you only have time to read one part, read the proposals for what we can do to resist.
\n\nIt’s understandable that many people feel exhausted at the prospect of a second Trump era. It’s easy to want to tune out and dissociate. What can we do, anyway?
\n\nBut we don’t know how the first Trump era would have gone if not for the ways that millions of people engaged in various forms of resistance. Difficult as it was, it could have been much worse. We didn’t topple capitalism or abolish the police, but we kept fascists from taking over the streets, and we prevented Trump and his supporters from accomplishing a great deal of their agenda. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to conceal our collective power.
\n\nAs long as we relied on our own strength, we became more and more powerful. Our protests galvanized others into action, showing what was at stake and where the regime was vulnerable. Our actions shaped public narratives, counteracting Trump’s efforts to determine popular discourse. The resulting unrest gave the capitalist class the impression that Trump’s reign was bad for business, sapping their support. It was only after we had apparently driven Trump from the stage of history that we let our guard down, permitting our social movements to dwindle and creating a situation in which the Democratic Party could cede power once again.
\n\nThe lesson is clear. We will only get what we win by our own efforts. The Trump era was not a historical anomaly. It’s not behind us. We are still in it, and we can only get through it by fighting.
\n\n\nNow it is happening again: the Democratic Party is handing Donald Trump the keys to the kingdom, including the most advanced means of repression in the history of the solar system. The popular power expressed in the 2020 uprising—the only thing that has been powerful enough to stop this aspiring dictator—has dissipated, undermined by the same Democrats who claimed that they knew best how to defeat Trump.
\n\nThis is a pivotal moment, and everyone who isn’t cynically detached is sounding the alarm. Those of us who recognize the necessity of fighting had better find each other, identify the strengths and weaknesses of all the parties involved, recall the lessons of the past eight years, and strategize.
\n\nIn some ways, we are in a worse position than we were in 2017. Trump’s election in 2016 came as a shock to everyone, provoking an immediate mass response; at the time, the occupation of Standing Rock and the uprisings against police violence in Ferguson and Baltimore were fresh in the minds of millions. This time, the 2020 uprising feels like a distant memory, despite the fact that it was exponentially larger than those earlier movements. Last spring’s student movement in solidarity with Palestine was inspiring, but it did not spread far enough beyond the universities to survive repression and summer break.
\n\nNonetheless, tens of millions of us share the experience of participating in the largest mass uprising in the United States in at least half a century. Those memories have been buried beneath subsequent sedimentary layers of history, but they are not entirely inaccessible.
\n\nFor the first time, Trump has won the popular vote, making gains with some voters of color. A larger part of the population is prepared to vote for overt fascism than before, knowing full well what they are doing this time. Although grassroots fascist activity dropped off after the abortive coup of January 6, 2021, neo-Nazis have resumed making appearances on the streets. If Trump pardons those serving time as a result of January 6, far-right organizations like the Proud Boys will likely return to the streets in full force.
\n\nAfter eight years of scandals and emergencies, everyone is desensitized and demoralized. Both institutional and rank-and-file Democrats appear to be prepared to roll over and let Trump do what he wants. Like in 2017, Republicans will control the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate; once again, they wield deep institutional power while pretending to be “rebels” against the state that they control. This time around, however, Trump is prepared to push his agenda much further. In 2017, as an upstart in the Republican Party, he was obliged to fill his administration with neocons and other traditional Republicans. Now the Republicans are united behind him, and he is preparing to gut the entire federal government and the upper ranks of the military and install a gang of loyalists.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/1.jpg\")
The fascism they want.
\nYet this could create new weaknesses for him. Promoting sycophants to positions of power on the basis of loyalty rather than expertise will not necessarily create an effective government. The more emboldened Trump and his henchmen are, the more likely they are to provoke resistance. In attempting to appoint a cabinet full of rapists, conspiracy theorists, and Fox News hosts, he will force even the most milquetoast liberals to at least temporarily cease to regard the United States government as legitimate. Purging thousands of people from the government and the military while waging open war upon some of the most desperate sectors of society could incite resistance on multiple fronts.
\n\nDonald Trump is not significantly more popular in 2024 than he was in 2020, nor does he represent a majority of the population. He added a couple million votes to the number he received in 2020, but he still received considerably fewer votes in 2024 than Joe Biden received in 2020, despite the fact that the US population has increased by several million since then. And remember—Biden was not actually popular in 2020, as became obvious afterwards.
\n\nSo Trump has not really gained popularity. The Democratic Party has lost popularity, that’s all.
\n\nThis is not surprising. The Democrats have sought to be the party of compromise between irresolvable opposites. They tried to fashion a compromise between capitalism and the working class, between police and the communities that they brutalize, between genocide and peace.1 Small wonder that they failed. Actually, it is surprising how well they did, considering that they ran on the platform of “democracy” without so much as offering voters a primary in which to choose a candidate. Most other ruling parties around the world fared even worse in the elections of 2024.
\n\nBut that doesn’t mean people like the Democrats. It just means that people hate Donald Trump.
\n\nIf some Democrats are eager to respond to this election by chasing the Republicans even further to the right, this only shows how badly they are still misjudging the situation. Their attempt to court the center by cozying up to neoconservatives failed to build a viable majority. This is because the status quo is unpopular. The people who propelled Trump to victory were largely casting protest votes against the ruling order. As we foresaw last July, the center cannot hold.
\n\nThe 2024 election represents the end of the technocratic neoliberal consensus that dominated the world from the 1970s to the 2010s. Trump’s popularity is not a unique phenomenon. All around the world, far-right populist movements are growing and authoritarian leaders are gaining political legitimacy. For decades, liberals and conservatives have worked together to suppress grassroots movements seeking to address the problems created by neoliberal capitalism; this created a vacuum that the far-right has ultimately filled. In that regard, the Democrats paved the way for nationalism and fascism to succeed neoliberalism. Presumably, they assume that those will be less threatening to their privileges than the end of capitalism would be.
\n\nPerhaps this explains how the Democratic Party could spend years decrying Trump as a fascist, then immediately arrange a peaceful transfer of power. Institutional Democrats are hiding their heads in the sand, hoping that if they remain faithful to the institutions of democracy, even unilaterally, those institutions might survive the next four years. But considering how dramatically the playing field has shifted over the past eight years, there is no reason to believe that those institutions will remain intact unless the ruling class needs them as bargaining chips.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/8a.jpg\")
The Democrats have no intention to stand up for those that Donald Trump intends to attack. They are the knowing accomplices of fascism.
\nNone of this is good news. Those who are disappointed by the Democrats will not necessarily find their way to movements for liberation. They could drift further to the right, or gravitate towards authoritarian leftist pyramid schemes, or withdraw into apathy entirely. But there are opportunities here.
\n\nIt is surprising that Trump could not add more to his voter base, considering that the world’s richest man supported him by spending $44 billion to buy the world’s chief political discussion platform and considerably more than $250 million more on private election canvassing—including efforts to bribe working-class voters by picking a daily million-dollar lottery winner.
\n\nReal supervillain stuff.
\n\nElon Musk and Donald Trump both pretend that they were drawn to politics out of a sense of civic duty; in fact, both are simply scaling up their business ventures by expanding to trade in state power.2 The day after the election, \na rise in stock shares added $26.5 billion to Musk’s net worth, in the biggest such spike on record. While the Democrats are still trying to preserve neoliberal capitalism as it was, the Republicans represent a new fusion of populist nationalism and oligarchy that seeks to extract profit directly through the state while channeling the rage of the poor into scapegoating the even poorer.
\n\nTrump and Musk are only able to masquerade as selfless benefactors because resources have become so unevenly distributed that a few billionaires can determine the outcome of an election. These are the same people who control the supply chain, the communications and news platforms, and the emerging fields of artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, and space travel. This is 21st-century fascism, in which autocracy and technocracy blend together, creating overlapping matrices of control that function at every scale from the intracellular to the interplanetary.3
\n\nWhatever promises they make to the white working class, their actual priority is to enrich themselves. You can’t carry out a gigantic wealth transfer into the coffers of billionaires while also solving the economic problems of ordinary Americans. Trump has always succeeded in taking advantage of popular grievances by making poor people identify with him as a symbol of success, giving them the vicarious thrill of cheering for the winning team even as he empties their pockets into his own. But that may not placate people indefinitely.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/9.jpg\")
The world’s richest man canvassed for Trump by picking a daily million-dollar lottery winner, essentially buying an advertisement in which a struggling working-class family had to gush about how grateful they were to their billionaire benefactors. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have no incentive to improve the lives of ordinary workers—the gulf between billionaires and workers is precisely what enables them to pull stunts like this.
\nOstensibly, Donald Trump intends to do to the United States government what Elon Musk did to Twitter: seize it, fire everyone who is not loyal to him, and turn it into a vehicle for profiteering and spreading fascism. When Musk took over Twitter, a rash of articles appeared claiming that he would drive it into the ground and the platform would soon cease to function entirely. Unfortunately, that would have been preferable to what actually happened. Despite a few technical glitches, Twitter kept functioning. Musk banned, drove away, or algorithmically suppressed enough of his critics to transform discourse on the platform, leaving just enough diversity intact to preserve popular investment. This is how authoritarians achieve hegemony: with a mix of repression and tolerance.
\n\nRegardless of the doomsaying of some journalists, we should anticipate something similar from the second Trump administration. There will be a messy transitional period and a wave of repression, but the real threat is that our society will continue functioning under an even more authoritarian framework—and that most people will accommodate themselves to it.
\n\nHowever, none of these stories has yet reached its conclusion. Ever since Musk acquired it, the platform formerly known as Twitter has been steadily losing credibility and hemorrhaging supporters—not unlike the United States government over the past decade. Historically, emperors surrounded by toadies who only tell them what they want to hear rarely manage to establish stability. We can anticipate chaos and disorganization, then—one crisis after another—and it is possible that the general population, always fickle, will turn against Trump as he fails to solve their problems, just as the Biden administration did.
\n\nSo now is the time to think boldly, to fight for something more inspiring than a return to Democratic rule. We are not surrounded by fascist bootlickers who desire to be dominated—or at least, they do not comprise a majority yet. We are surrounded by desperate people who are largely disappointed in electoral politics because it has so little to offer them. They will remain on the sidelines until a better way opens up.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/2.jpg\")
The desire to see others harmed in their name has come to substitute for the desire to improve their own lives.
\nWe have at least one advantage. Donald Trump is a known quantity. If it is not always possible to foresee his moves, his reactions are usually predictable. It should be possible to exploit his weaknesses.
\n\nTrump thrives on media attention. Seeking to control the news cycle, he manufactures one crisis after another, each intended to distract from the last. During his first term, this forced many people into a cycle of reaction, allowing Trump to set the tempo of engagement. When your enemy controls the tempo of the conflict, he can keep you continually on the defensive.
\n\nTo this end, Trump is always saying and doing horrible things. With his cabinet picks, for example, it appears that he is trying to provoke a scandal so that his most outrageous nominations function as lightning rods channeling anger and attention, enabling him to push through the rest of his agenda unnoticed.
\n\nIt is up to us to set our own priorities, to seize the initiative and force our adversaries to fight on the terrain we choose. Knowing some of Trump’s plans for his first days in office, we can begin choosing battles that we might be able to win. The earlier that people can achieve a few decisive victories, even on a local scale, the sooner people everywhere will rediscover that resistance is possible.
\n\nTrump will overreach, especially if we force him to. Recall the heady days of summer 2020, when he was trying to show his backers in the ruling class that he could regain control of the streets. When he sent federal agents into Portland in July 2020, he was pouring gasoline on a fire, catalyzing a massive public response that the federal agencies loyal to him—chiefly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security—could not suppress. Those who had initially watched from the sidelines eventually poured into the streets, taking up umbrellas, leaf blowers, fireworks, and shields. They continued coming out for over a hundred consecutive days.
\n\nArguably, Trump was not defeated at the polls in November of that year, but in the streets in July 2020, when the people of Portland demonstrated that his lackeys were no match for them. This cost Trump the support of capitalists seeking to reestablish law and order—at least in that election.4
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/12.jpg\")
Portland, summer 2020.
\nA crucial element of the victory that took place in summer 2020 was the polarization of local and state governments against Trump. The complicity of Democratic officials in “blue” states and cities is well-established, but they still have to pretend to represent their constituencies, which often means chasing after powerful social movements in hopes of coopting them. If we play our cards right, we should be able to force Democrat-controlled local and state governments and agencies to refuse to cooperate with at least some of Trump’s programs. In 2020, popular sentiment forced many local prosecutors to drop the charges against those arrested during the uprising. Many municipalities have been declared sanctuary cities. As empty as those words often are, we can aim to force politicians to give them meaning. Any division that emerges within the ruling class, however small, will be to our advantage.
\n\nThe first battle will be fought for the hearts—and schedules—of anarchists and other rebels who were active in 2020. Do we have it in us to mobilize again, more, differently? The second battle will be fought for a broader swath of the population, including rank-and-file Democrats. Are they prepared to accept the second Trump era as business as usual, or will they gravitate towards resistance?
\n\nIf Democrat politicians are not compelled to break with the Republican agenda, we could end up in a countrywide situation analogous to what happened to the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, where the majority of the general population came to oppose the proposed police training facility but politicians of every stripe closed ranks in a bipartisan consensus in favor of imposing it by brute force. But if a critical mass of rank-and-file Democrats conclude that they have a responsibility to become unruly, that will force at least some Democratic politicians to hold themselves apart from the “law and order” consensus.
\n\nWe should also anticipate defections from the bureaucratic and managerial classes. Trump plans to fire thousands of federal employees and surely many more will resign. The effects will trickle down to every level of society. We need to create opportunities for newly disaffected people to connect with each other and put their skills at the service of the movement. If some of them bring insider knowledge of the bureaucracy, all the better. When it comes to leaks from those who retain their positions, there should be an emphasis on equipping movements to act rather than simply seeking to discredit the administration in an imagined court of public opinion.
\n\nTo take on an entire government, we have to create friction between the different factions that comprise it and exploit the vulnerabilities that this opens up.
\n\nSome of the tools and strategies that we relied on during the first Trump administration may no longer serve us.
\n\nDoxxing, deplatforming, and social media bans could disrupt right-wing formations until the right seized control of social media platforms like Twitter. They are unlikely to be effective under an openly fascist regime in which far-right street fighters are granted clemency and rewarded for their misdeeds via crowdfunding and media hype.
\n\nEven before Elon Musk purchased Twitter, social media platforms had become sparring rings in which contenders jockeyed for legitimacy in a zero-sum competition, and this had filtered out to influence the atmosphere of some other organizing venues. Such dynamics do not serve us well. This time around, we will have to set aside a variety of destructive patterns if we are to create ecosystems of resistance that can thrive under such challenging conditions.
\n\nMutual aid projects will be important. People will need hormones, birth control, abortion pills, money for traveling for medical care or escaping a hostile environment, assistance averting various forms of state violence. But these are fundamentally defensive strategies that must be connected with offensive forms of struggle to succeed.5 We cannot separate care and struggle, nor should we let the desire for individual safety interfere with the forms of collective action that represent our only hope of following through on the slogan “We keep us safe.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/5.jpg\")
Fundamentally, this is a struggle between empathy and selfishness, between solidarity and hatred.
\nWe must refuse to let any aspect of Trump’s agenda become normalized. At the same time, we should not let his actions provoke us into a condition of perpetual outrage that produces diminishing returns. We must pay close attention to what is happening without letting him dictate the pace of our actions or drain our emotional energy. This requires thinking strategically, looking for opportunities to act effectively rather than simply to pass judgment. Every day will be its own emergency, and each one will be truly urgent—and yet we will not be able to change our priorities every day. We will have to build sustainable forms of resistance through continuous action, seeking strategies that build capacity over time rather than burning out.
\n\nIf we can develop such strategies, they will also prepare us to confront what Adam Greenfield calls the long emergency of intertwined climate change, political instability, and societal collapse. As hurricanes and floods batter our communities alongside new assaults from the state, we must accept that nothing is ever going back to normal and proceed accordingly.
\n\nWe will not be able to simply pick up where we left off in 2020. Once again, there will be a learning curve—we will have to connect with new people, demonstrate tactics, make proposals, and debunk liberal assumptions about what is acceptable or effective. If we can hold our ground long enough, some sectors of the population that are currently beguiled or demoralized will probably become restless again, especially if the economy does not improve. But we also can’t let Trump steal a march on us. The first few months will determine how far this goes, how fast.
\n\nMany of Trump’s ostensible opponents have maintained that two of the negative consequences of the next Trump administration will be that more people will “radicalize” (to the left as well as the right) and that there will be “chaos” (which is to say, disruptive protests). The implication is that Trump wants and benefits from both of these phenomena. It is incumbent on us to articulate which kinds of polarization and chaos actually benefit Trump and which do not. Donald Trump did not win the 2024 elections because people took to the streets—he lost the 2020 elections as a consequence of disruptive protests, and he won the 2024 election in part because those died off. Everyone must understand this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/6.jpg\")
Demonstrators in Portland, Oregon at the conclusion of Donald Trump’s first term.
\nHere are some concrete steps that we can take as individuals and movements.
\n\nIn some ways, Trump’s victory can be traced directly to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. With Musk playing a role in the incoming Trump administration, the platform may provide warrant-free intelligence directly to federal agencies, while the algorithms will continue to promote authoritarian narratives. Now that tech billionaires are accommodating themselves to Trump’s rule, the same goes for Facebook, which has already lost status as an organizing space, but also for Instagram, which countless anarchist and leftist projects still depend on. This is not just a concern for self-identifying radicals, but for everyone who relies on social media for information.
\n\nFortunately, since the election, millions of people have been fleeing Musk’s platform. Some are going to Instagram Threads, which is hardly better, but millions have been joining Bluesky, creating a new public sphere that could play a role in circulating news and ideas. While the owners of Bluesky have succeeded in branding it as a welcoming space for many of the demographics that the Trump administration intends to target, it remains to be seen how durable that will be—and as long as capitalism prevails, every corporate-owned platform remains at the mercy of the market. For these reasons, Mastodon is still the best bet, but thus far, people are not joining it in massive enough numbers for it to suffice to inform the kind of mass movements we will need.
\n\nThe unequivocally good news is that the exodus from Musk’s platform shows that people are not yoked to social media platforms, no matter how well-established. From now on, tech billionaires who seek to control the “public square” will be aiming at a moving target.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/11.jpg\")
\nGet people in your community used to coming together in person. Establish face-to-face relationships between people doing different kinds of organizing and impacted by different aspects of the Trump agenda. One easy way to get this process started is to host ongoing assemblies, whether to connect new people to ongoing organizing or for different groups and tendencies to establish complementary strategies. Another option is to establish a public venue, such as a social center or regular meeting place, that can serve as a hub for ongoing coordination and a point of entry for people looking to get involved. A third possibility is to establish neighborhood associations connecting those who live and work close to each other.
\n\nMost people learn best through action and experimentation. It is better to try something out, learning in the process, than to attempt to reach consensus about the perfect idea.
\n\nOnce the Trump era gets underway, it will be important to have means via which to immediately circulate breaking news about opportunities to resist or to support targeted groups. One way to do this is to set up an announcements-only thread on Signal and promote it to everyone who might need it. It might make sense to establish a few different response networks—one to announce federal operations and immigration checkpoints in your area, another to promote local organizing events, and so on.
\n\nGet these structures in place now, before the pace of events picks up.
\n\nWe should take seriously the economic concerns that pushed some people towards Trump. We know the economy will not work for poor people under Trump, either; it may well get worse. Mutual aid projects are one of the only ways that we can demonstrate to some of those who voted for Trump that they are better off making common cause with us than trusting politicians’ lies.
\n\nWhile it will be tempting to retreat into enclaves or break off conversations with those who do not already agree with us, we should seek to nourish social connections that are not yet politically mapped and polarized.
\n\nOne of the challenges that the authorities will face is that the court and prison systems are already overextended. If they attempt to escalate to more widespread repression, they might overwhelm the judicial apparatus. We should be prepared to make the most of this, tying them up in court and drawing out proceedings wherever possible.
\n\nPrepare to respond to ICE raids in clever and effective ways that use repression to leverage outrage. Mass deportations will require massive logistics and infrastructure, providing a host of opportunities for intervention.
\n\nThis option is explored in detail below.
\n\nEncourage liberals who have experience with phone canvassing to participate in call-in campaigns to pressure officials or support arrestees and prisoners.
\n\nThe police always comprise the cutting edge of state violence; once again, they will be at the forefront of imposing all of Trump’s policies. Through four years of centrist reaction, the Democratic Party and corporate news platforms promulgated a “law and order” narrative intended to re-legitimize the police; the second Trump era will make it clear once again that police are simply the stormtroopers of the ruling class. What’s more, as Trump calls for new crackdowns, the police may be overextended in new ways.
\n\nThe most powerful uprisings in this country over the past fifteen years have been revolts against the police, culminating in 2020. Resistance to police connects those who oppose state violence on ideological grounds to those who continuously experience it firsthand. This has made for explosive forms of solidarity before, and it can again.
\n\nIf we want to make our opposition to police as persuasive as possible, however, we should also be experimenting with grassroots programs to address the issues that they supposedly exist to solve. Capitalism has done real damage to the social fabric, contributing to fentanyl overdoses, increasingly visible poverty and mental health crises, and other forms of mass violence. More policing will not fix those problems. By drawing resources out of every form of social support and channeling them towards state repression, politicians have gambled that they can stabilize an extremely unequal society via continuously escalating exertions of violent force. We should demonstrate that there is an alternative.
\n\nLiberals who chanted “No one is above the law” during the first Trump administration must recognize that, with the Supreme Court and much of the judiciary under his control, it no longer makes sense to count on the courts to restrain him. The same goes for the federal investigations in which Democrats invested so much hope. This should be a teachable moment for them: if they are sincere, they will have to get involved with grassroots forms of direct action.
\n\nLiberals must stop thinking about the government as representing what is best within humanity. It has become eminently clear that capitalism and the state are elevating the worst elements of humanity to positions of authority. This is not an accident, but the structural consequence of the systems that distribute power. To navigate the ongoing Trump era, we will need to share a thoroughgoing analysis of these systems.
\n\nSpread narratives impugning obedience itself. As Hannah Arendt said, in the face of fascism, “No one has the right to obey.” Make sure that these reach functionaries in the bureaucracy and members of the armed forces. Police departments and federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security are already comprised of hardened mercenaries who have no compunction about doing harm in return for a paycheck, but not everyone in the armed forces or bureaucracy will be enthusiastic about serving Trump’s whims.
\n\nFor those who have not been on the streets continuously since 2017, it will help to study the various struggles of the first Trump era in order to refine a sense of strategy and historic context.
\n\nAs resistance gets underway, it will be crucial to make it visible to everyone who has a stake in participating. This could mean making the walls speak with posters and stickers. It could mean distributing literature at your school or in your community. It could mean creating art and music that strengthens the resolve to resist.
\n\nAll of us would probably rather be doing something other than scrambling to prevent fascism from taking hold. We need to find ways to keep this work interesting to us and to everyone else who will have to do it—ways to keep our spirits up and to develop the kind of character that will sustain us through periods of hardship.
\n\nTry to organize a concrete victory early on, however small. Brainstorm with your friends: what Trump policy will be least popular in our local community? Make a plan to contest the implementation of that policy. Get started before Trump is inaugurated.
\n\nThink about how to offer roles to new people, welcoming them into the fight. To succeed, our strategies will have to be reproducible and contagious. Everything we do—regardless of how popular it is—will have to create conditions that will draw more people into action. It is a mistake to flatten differences into a popular front, but we will need as many people involved in the resistance as possible. When you encounter differences, don’t get stuck in ideological posturing; make a proposition about what you can do together based on what you have in common.
\n\nAbove all, do not let resignation take hold. Resignation is the foundation of fascism, more so than jackbooted thugs and prison camps. Our enemies are counting on us to assume that resistance is impossible, to keep our heads down while our neighbors disappear, our communities are plundered, our life support systems are dismantled. But resistance is always possible. The fact that you are reading this right now proves that.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/20/7.jpg\")
Demonstrators mobilize in Berkeley, California at the beginning of Donald Trump’s first term.
\nThe incoming administration has been very clear about their intention to maintain public support by attacking scapegoats. This was one of the central promises of their campaign and it is popular among Trump’s core supporters. We can understand this as the desire of an increasingly powerless population to enact violence vicariously through a brutal autocrat—an ominous sign of human beings turning on each other as profit margins diminish and prospects for the future decline.
\n\nIf we let Donald Trump and Stephen Miller expand the infrastructure of state violence, using military funds to build “vast holding facilities” for the millions that they have promised to arrest and deport, they will not stop at deporting undocumented immigrants. Once that additional infrastructure exists, they will turn it against one target after another. Eventually, they will come for all of us.
\n\nAll who don’t want to see their neighbors, friends, and classmates or coworkers disappeared share a responsibility to act. During Trump’s first term, opposition to his border regime was a powerful cause of popular unrest, from the airport occupations in response to his “Muslim Ban” to the Occupy ICE encampments and the outpouring of solidarity following his manufactured “border crisis” in fall 2018. In 2019, when Donald Trump announced that ICE was about to carry out a new round of massive raids, Willem van Spronsen gave his life in an attempt to disable to the fleet of buses serving a private immigration detainment facility in Tacoma. Afterwards, asked why the raids were not happening, an ICE official expressed that they were concerned for the safety of their officers.
\n\nOpposition to Trump’s border policies initially emerged in the streets and airports; only afterwards did legal challenges emerge in the courts. Now, of course, we cannot expect much from a court system that will be dominated by Trump appointees. It will be necessary take steps to prevent the deportation machinery from functioning: to block it via mass action when possible, but also to throw sand in the gears, to disrupt its logistics and organization.
\n\nLet’s take a brief look at how Trump might implement these mass deportations and what forms resistance could assume.
\n\nAccording to Jason Hauser, the chief of staff for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Biden, the infrastructure already exists to expand the deportation machine to a massive scale. Guatemalan, Haitian, and Honduran communities may be targeted first, because deportation to those countries is more straightforward than to many other countries. These communities will likely be targeted with raids at workplaces, churches, hospitals, and schools, and the arrests of those who are already on the record for nonviolent offences or because of their limbo status in an asylum process. Expect raids, buses, and camps.
\n\nOnce apprehended, these people must be transported to holding facilities. Those could be rapidly erected tents, existing jails that are packed to two or three times their official capacity limits, warehouses converted into temporary detention facilities, military bases, or new facilities constructed with military funding. One official claims that 25 temporary detention facilities could be created in existing warehouses in just one week.
\n\nOnce in custody, the arrestees will eventually be deported by plane flights. ICE currently has 14 dedicated deportation planes that can carry 135 people each, amounting to a total capacity of 1890 people per round trip. They also contract out many flights through Classic Air Charter, subcontracting with Swift Air and World Atlantic Airlines. If Trump succeeds in invoking the Insurrection Act or the Alien Enemies Act to mobilize the military and bypass immigration hearings, this number could rise dramatically. The current ICE director estimates that between 150,000 and 200,000 people could be deported within the first one or two months, and up to a million in the first 100 days.
\n\nThis is frightening. And yet plans rarely survive contact with reality. Mass deportation would mean visible ICE actions with the cooperation of law enforcement in every sector of society. It would mean buses filled with prisoners everywhere. It would mean local law enforcement agencies being pulled away from other tasks and redirected towards immigration enforcement. It would mean plane after plane full of neighbors, family members, and friends, handcuffed and waiting on the tarmac. All of these are opportunities for resistance to erupt. The deportations will not all occur in darkness; many of them will take place in public, in broad daylight. It is up to us to make sure that no one can ignore them, and to help others to understand what they can do.
\n\nArmies succeed or fail based on their logistics. A complex logistical chain involving multiple agencies and forms of transportation, directed by leaders who are attempting to act on a much larger scale than before, will be prone to failure. How might these logistical links fail?
\n\nAs the saying goes, our enemies have names and addresses. During the first Trump presidency, people doxxed every ICE agent they could find. Every raid will require the cooperation of local law enforcement; each one will involve staging areas and transport buses. Where do the buses come from? Who maintains them? Are those people also ideologically invested in fascism, or do some of them have misgivings? Where will the new detention facilities be staged? Who will build them? What airports will these deportation flights leave from? What supply lines will support them? How many low-wage airport workers have a stake in the fight against fascism?
\n\nIn one possible version of an anti-deportation struggle, there will be mass demonstrations, moral outrage, fruitless lawsuits, and symbolic civil disobedience. Most of the participants will be self-professed activists. Efforts to center the authority of existing formal organizations that are not in a position to call for certain kinds of action will impose limits on what tactics the movement can experiment with. Internal divisions and interpersonal competition for control of the movement will further hamper it.
\n\nIn another possible version of the struggle, every sector of society will become involved in resisting the deportation machine. Local liberal-leaning governments will be pressured into refusing to cooperate with federal agencies. Rapid response networks will bring people out in massive numbers to confront raids—and not all of them will limit themselves to following the leadership of official organizations. Bus drivers will go on strike; buses will mysteriously cease to function; coordinated highway blockades could shut down traffic to airports that are critical deportation hubs. Every form of struggle will emerge, and every participant will be encouraged to take whatever action they can, and the combination of anger and small, concrete victories will motivate more people to act.
\n\nThe deportations—and any struggle against them—will happen in physical reality, not on social media. If a dozen communities begin immediately organizing mass strategic resistance to deportation, researching logistical chains, outlining targets and strategic goals, and welcoming a diversity of participants and tactics, they could demonstrate effective resistance and light a signal fire for others around the country. If people get organized now and begin to map out and target the infrastructure for mass deportation before Trump takes office, they could seize the initiative, set the tempo, and force him to be the one to have to react.
\n\nIn 2017, when Trump signed the so-called “Muslim ban,” a single mass occupation at JFK Airport in New York sparked occupations involving tens of thousands of people around the country. Tactics spread rapidly when they are inspiring. What can you and your community do, right now, to prepare to inspire nationwide resistance to the deportation machine?
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George Orwell wrote “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” But the future is unwritten. What comes next will depend, in part, on us.
\nJust as the Democrats willingly undermined the “international rules-based system” that they supposedly represent in order to facilitate genocide in Palestine, it is not surprising that they are willing to sacrifice the democratic order to fascists in the name of protecting the democratic order. For all of Trump’s rhetoric about the United Nations, the Democratic Party’s unconditional support for the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government has done more to undermine the UN as a political force than anything Trump has done. ↩
\nElon Musk became the world’s richest man in part as a consequence of the United States government channeling billions of taxpayer dollars into Tesla in the form of government loans, contracts, tax credits, and subsidies. He knows that who controls Washington, DC determines who can make a killing in the market. ↩
\nAs our Russian colleagues have pointed out in response to this analysis, “The Russian Federation of 2024 is what Donald Trump’s America could become someday if it continues to move in the same political direction. [Vladimir] Putin and [oligarchs Igor] Sechin and [Sergey] Chemezov are Trump and Elon Musk taken to the extreme… in Russia, this process has already ended or is close to ending: the state is 100% controlled by a conglomerate of huge monopolies that have merged with the security apparatus and suck money directly from the budget under the pretext that ‘a holy war is underway.’ And the people’s discontent is redirected, with the help of total propaganda, to a variety of scapegoats: Ukrainians, labor migrants from Tajikistan, LGBT people, and so on. A name has long been invented for such a political regime. This name is ‘fascism.’” ↩
\nBillionaires want a president in the White House who will funnel money to them, but they don’t want it at the cost of the smooth functioning of the economy. If a critical mass of billionaires shifted their allegiances to Trump between 2020 and 2024, it was, in part, because the Democrats succeeded in pacifying street unrest during that time, emboldening the billionaires to see whether they could get away with imposing more draconian conditions. ↩
\nDuring the first Trump presidency, networks sprang up to support marginalized people in “red” states; this peaked in 2020 with a wave of redistribution efforts aimed at combating white supremacy by moving resources around on an individual basis. It is noteworthy that these funds and initiatives became ubiquitous only after the first phase of the George Floyd Uprising, when the struggle shifted from burning police stations to holding signs and kneeling. This time around, we can aspire to establish collective projects that function as a commons that benefits all participants, rather than attempting to solve the systemic problems that capitalism creates with individualized solutions. ↩
\n![fascism](\"https://www.m9.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/mass-deportation-immigrants-ohio.jpg\"){kind=link}