In the last fifty years, work on racial capitalism, materialist feminism, and Black feminism have transformed scholarship and activism on class and capitalism. But social movements and scholars have struggled to adequately grapple with the complexity of class and class struggle and what these ideas mean for twenty-first century movements. In conversation for the first time, historians Julie Greene and Michael Reagan will discuss the ways in which class is in need of new theoretical foundations in both movement spaces and in scholarship. Grounded in intersectional theory, their approaches develop a class tradition to help address the biting problems of our era.
Michael Reagan’s new book, Intersectional Class Struggle: Theory and Practice, from the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) and AK Press, is available directly from the IAS here.
This innovative study explores the relevance of class as a theoretical category in our world today, arguing that leading traditions of class analysis have missed major elements of what class is and how it operates. It combines instersectional theory and materialism to show that culture, economics, ideology, and consciousness are all factors that go into making “class” meaningful. Using a historical lens, this book studies the experiences of working class peoples, from migrant farm workers in California’s Central Valley, to the “factory girls” of New England, and Black workers in the South, to explore the variety of working-class experiences. It investigates how the concepts of racial capitalism and Black feminist thought, when applied to class studies and popular movements, allow us to walk and chew gum at the same time—to recognize that our movements can be diverse and particularistic as well as have elements of the universal experience shared by all workers. Ultimately, it argues that class is made up of all of us, it is of ourselves, in all our contradiction and complexity. Michael Beyea Reagan is a historian, teacher, and activist in Seattle, Washington. His writing can be found in Truthout, CounterPunch, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, and the Evergreen Review.
Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement, by Don Hamerquist & J. Sakai, Anti-Racist Action Chicago and Mark Salotte, (AK Press, 2017) and Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe’s Antifascist Struggle, by Patrick O. Strickland, (AK Press, 2019)
(translated from Portuguese)
In the opening essay of Confronting Fascism, “Fascism & Antifascism,” Don Hamerquist assumes that the term “fascism,” as utilized in colloquial language, causes a misunderstanding among regular Americans who are uninvolved in revolutionary processes. To that end, Hamerquist affirms that the intent of the book is to dialogue with Leftist and antifascist fighters, and that they are the true validation for what he is saying, not confining himself to strictly theoretical arguments.
Fascism is not just a term that says something is terrible, but above all refers to a particular form of capitalism, making its genocidal, imperialist, racist, reactionary, and repressive character clear. However, Hamerquist does not limit his definition of fascism to a kind of end stage capitalism, but stresses that it occurs also in anti-capitalist mass movements, urging those of us confronting fascism to analyze the phenomenon with all the seriousness it requires and not just accept that it comes only from above and is simply a product of capitalism. Fascism comes from below. The danger posed by fascism is imminent. In fact, I dare say that it is not just knocking, it has already broken through the windows and lives among us. Hamerquist fears that fascism will spread and consolidate amongst vast groups in society. Concerning this fear, a dialogue with the phrase “social fascism,” coined by Boaventura Sousa Santos, is helpful.
Historically, as pointed out by Buenaventura Durruti, fascism is the means utilized by capitalists when they are losing power. For Durruti, fascism’s genesis is linked to the perpetuation of power at the hands of the bourgeoisie. But the development of fascism in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany in the 1920s shows the possibility of fascism developing amongst the masses, not necessarily generated from above by the capitalist class. This view of fascism as an insurgent force from below can help explain, for example, the alliance between the United States – the greatest symbol of modern imperialism and capitalism – and the Soviet Union – the leading country of the socialist block at the time – against fascism.
Historically, democratic projects such as social democracy stand as a counterpoint to fascism, but these are not the only ones. In the current moment, anarchists and other leftists around the world have come together around the antifascist agenda. Social democracy, even as it stands as a counterpoint to fascism, is not, in fact, a revolutionary movement. Social democracy as an ideology does not question the capitalist status quo or the forms of oppression necessary to sustain it, and instead advocates for democratic capitalism. In other words, it does not fight for the end to all oppression. Hamerquist points out that, eventually, social democrats would move to ally with fascists as a way to combat against communism.
At first, the growth of fascism tends to be ignored because its seeds start in groups that do not seem as if they could become a great threat. For instance, President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil once did not seem capable of gathering great power, appearing instead as an exaggerated caricature of right-wing hysteria. However, expansion of social networks, the creation of companies capable of spreading and reaching millions with fake news, and ignorance or apathy regarding effective popular organizing have allowed figures like this, once only worthy of ridicule, to reach great positions of power. More than that, they can easily mobilize a fascist agenda, and this does not always ensure greater capitalist development. Mobilization of hatred in these governments is far more evident than any effort to promote a capitalist economic agenda.
Hamerquist sees the construction of a true left-wing bloc as necessary in confronting fascism, with the political Left working for its popularization and development. A mobilization of the masses around an antifa mindset is the antidote to the sentiments already developing to turn everyday people toward fascism. Hamerquist highlights, however, that because fascists are often also anti-capitalists, it is not always clear who the fascists necessarily are. There are also people calling themselves liberals who associate with movements preaching white supremacy, for example.
Black communities (and other non-white groups) are confronted with the contradiction and domination of their realities by white supremacy. But the existence of ethnic and racial minorities, or people of the so-called Third World, is not an automatic assurance that an elaborate antifascist belief and tactics will be developed. Many of these groups suffer from the influence of religious extremists and those who strive to preserve their traditions and ancestries. Others face the hardships of being immigrants. Evidently, fascism weighs its hand over these people as well. Within these communities, true antifascist fronts are formed, both in culture and in direct confrontations, but the fact is the people caught up in this daily oppression do not become antifascist militants automatically: popular and political organization is necessary.
Hamerquist stresses that fighting right-wing authoritarianism with left-wing authoritarianism does not generate a society free of fascism. More than that, he points out, it generates disengagement by the general populace instead of alignment with leftist thinking. It should not be a surprise that Stalinist or even Maoist practices, for instance, would cause horror to all those who desire a world of freedom.
Militarism is another relevant aspect discussed by Hamerquist. He notes that some groups believe that they must create military apparatus for antifascist groups, citing Britain’s Red Action. These leftist armed organizations with military formation are not new. The Brazilian guerrillas against the dictatorship had armed groups; the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) are organized around paramilitary tactics; the current Kurdish fighters and the Black Panther Party had armed wings and forces. However, Hamerquist does not believe that militarism is really necessary for the antifascist Left. He believes, coming from a Gramscian perspective, that militarism relies on the premise of attack, while antifascism is essentially a defensive movement. He therefore advocates creativity in the forms of action as vital for the triumph of groups opposing fascism.
Finally, Hamerquist suggests that to create a false conflict between organized and spontaneous groups generates unnecessary fragmentation of the Left. In addition, it is fundamental to create and diffuse revolutionary culture in daily life, so we do not lose ourselves in the idea that antifascism or anti-capitalism are merely unreachable utopias.
The second part of the book, by J. Sakai, further discusses the common sense concept of fascism, reminding us that it is a term we all have heard, but that we easily identify as something from the past, forgotten in World War II. But we also forget about the term when faced, for example, by the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.
The author draws attention to the three characteristics Hamerquist defines as essential to understanding his concept of fascism. The characteristics, as cited by Sakai, are:
1) Fascism is arising not from simple poverty or economic depression, but from the spreading zone of today’s protracted capitalist crisis beyond either reform or normal repression;
2) As fascism is moving from the margins to the populist mainstream, it still has a defined class character as an “extraordinary” revolutionary movement of men from the lower middle classes and the declassed;
3) The critical turning point now for fascism is not just Europe. With the failure of state socialism and national liberation movements in the capitalist periphery in the Third World, the far right, including fascists, are trying to align with the leadership of anti-colonialism. (1)
Sakai also describes the presence of fascist discourse in musical groups and debates the relationship between religious fundamentalism and fascism, claiming that it is possible to look at groups such as Al Qaeda and see not only the influence of extreme religious ideology, (2) but also the use of fascist tactics, through the extermination of the Other.
It is important to point out that, like Hamerquist, Sakai asserts and demonstrates that fascism is not just a tool of capitalists. Fascism as a political phenomenon has its own contours, and can happen within officially non-capitalist contexts, marked by authoritarianism, implicit or explicit, and to the Left or to the Right in its political ideology. This is despite the fact that fascism often serves the purposes of maintenance and perpetuation of capitalism when it faces crisis. Sakai sums up this perspective well:
“While usual classes are engaged in economic production and distribution, fascism to support its heightened parasitism is driven to develop a lumpen-capitalist economy more focused on criminality, war, looting and enslavement. In its highest development, as in Nazi Germany, fascism eliminates the dangerous class contradiction of the old working class by socially dispersing and wiping it out as a class, replacing its labor with a new unfree proletariat of women, colonial prisoners and slaves. The ‘extraordinary’ culture of the developed fascist State is like a nightmare vision of extreme capitalism, but the big bourgeoisie themselves do not have it under control. That is its unique characteristic.” (3)
A third essay in the book, “Revolutionary Anti-Fascism: Some Strategic Questions,” by Mark Salotte, brings us closer to contemporary antifascist fights, starting with a discussion of N30 in Seattle – the 1999 shutdown of the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks – which marked a new period in leftist struggle, and the events of September 11, 2001 in New York City and Washington, DC.
Seattle’s N30 WTO shutdown was a series of direct actions that mobilized up to 100,000 people, including ecologists, students, anarchists, labor unions, and others. These actions were not organized by institutional partisan groups and represented the strength of widespread popular indignation against the advancement of neoliberal capitalism. The events of September 11 were an action by Al Qaeda, which led to the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings and part of the Pentagon in Washington, symbols of capitalist and state power in the US. This second event differentiates itself from the first by being an act coordinated by Al Qaeda, a centralized, authoritarian and hierarchical group.
It is evident that both events/actions were planned for months prior, and their impacts in political reorganization – for both the Right and Left – share some similarities. However, both situations can be interpreted as milestones in the growth of fascism in the twenty-first century, underscoring that fascism is not confined to the history books, but has broken through the gates and is found in our midst.
Salotte presents a more optimistic perspective than Hamerquist or Sakai, picturing ways for the Left to grow. But he recognizes that the State attempts to contain revolt, and there are different ways that the State can do that: by containment, repression, or seeking to control political organizations. Therefore, Salotte points to contemporary anarchists as the example for antifascist groups. He argues that anarchists organize in a way meant clearly to deny State intrusion and control, which is one of the greatest obstacles posed to popular, widespread resistance to fascism.
Contributing to the discussion, Alerta! Alerta!: Snapshots of Europe’s Antifascist Struggle takes a historical snapshot of fascist actions occurring in Europe in previous moments, reporting on situations in Germany, Greece, Slovakia, Italy and Croatia, up into the twenty-first century. Comparing the earlier Confronting Fascism with this work offers us the opportunity to see how fascism is already part of daily life, in its institutional spaces as well as in its imaginary and action.
Alerta! Alerta! author, journalist Patrick Strickland, begins with the narrative of each of these countries in weaving his considerations of fascism. Concerning Germany, he writes of the memories of Irmela Mensah-Scharmm, an anti-fascist fighter convicted of vandalism. One of her forms of resistance was to erase and modify graffiti with fascist content. Through her memories, the author tells us the history of Nazism in Germany, under the motto of “Germany for the Germans.” This woman’s narrative tells us about her confrontations with alt-right protests, including one in which she saw a young man alluding to US President Donald Trump, a symbol of how fascism is a global phenomenon. In the authors’ conversations, themes such as the rejection of immigrants – particularly Muslims – are frequent in Europe, a situation also discussed by the authors of Confronting Fascism. Just like in Hitler’s time, current fascists believe that today’s immigrants, much like the Jews before, are a threat to national identity. Strickland seeks out resistance in German history, including anarcho-syndicalist groups at the beginning of the twentieth century, up until the more recent events.
In a chapter about Greece, Strickland begins by recounting the confrontation with the alt-right in March, 2017:
“… a group of seven black-masked anarchists approached the headquarters of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party near the Greek capital’s Larissa Station, a central train stop in the densely populated working-class borough of Kolonos. Armed with sledgehammers, sticks, and road flares, many of them donned motorcycle helmets in anticipation of a fight with the far-right Golden Dawn members. But on this morning, they met no resistance. The anti-fascists quickly smashed the windows and threw flares into the office. Messages lambasting the Golden Dawn were spray-painted on the door. According to some accounts, those inside the office, unprepared for a confrontation, quickly fled. Security camera footage of the incident emerged in the local media within hours and went viral on social media.” (4)
This action led to the imprisonment of several activists later that day, and the repercussions of the act continued in the following weeks and can be observed even today. In a relatively recurring way, Greece always reports news of direct radical action by anarchist and antifascist groups, beyond the successful example of Exarchia, an important community where anarchists of different tendencies coexist.
Popular mobilization in Greece depends on the participation of students, immigrants, workers, and others. Given the geographical location of Greece and the ease of entry via sea, the country has a strong presence of refugees and immigrants, with highlights to the Notara Center and the Solidarity in Exarchia, and so antifa groups perform significant protective and welcoming actions to these people, while the right persecutes them.
In a chapter about Slovakia, the author starts by telling the story of a Ján Benčík, whose son created his own Facebook account, and the retired man realized from there the possibilities of fighting against the far-right, using the platform to expose politicians and personalities engaged with the far-right in the country. One of the targets of the activist’s exposition was Our People’s Slovakia Party (LSNS), once considered a group of little relevance. However, in 2016, the group obtained a significant number of votes in the ballot, showing growth in the far-right and how it was reconfiguring the political map, a situation that repeated itself along the decade in several countries across the globe. This growth of the group in institutional politics led to a popular reaction, and people then went out to the streets to show their discontent.
Obviously, the activist and many of his followers started to suffer backlash and persecution, and a xenophobic tone was common. With the hate groups repeating the old formula of protecting the national identity, the Romani groups were one of the main targets of hate. Tension between the Romani in this region of Europe is latent, and their traditions are always threatened by the far-right.
Talking about Italy’s history, the author discusses a conversation with Fabrizio Torva, a graduate student resident in Quarticciolo, a poor area of the city, marked by urban occupations, criminality, and drug trafficking. These things are characteristic of many working-class Italian neighborhoods, which are home to precarious sectors of the population. The student was one of the founders of Palestra Popolare Quarticciolo, the neighborhood’s antifascist academy, one of the countless initiatives in Italy that are a form of resistance by people not willing to not let the terror of Mussolini ravage the country again.
The young man believes that the contradictions of his neighborhood are a reflex of contemporary Italy, where the difficulties of survival are everywhere. From this young man’s narrative, other resistances and tensions in the country appear and are presented throughout the book.
The commitment of anti-fascist resistance to solidarity with immigrants permeates Alerta! Alerta! The migration situation in Europe has been one of the most important political debates, reflecting geopolitical and diplomatic problems of great dimensions such as the Brexit situation in the United Kingdom, with a movement in England to leave the European Union.
The author traces a conversation with Croatian Lovro Krnić, an antifa activist, who has a strong presence on the internet, with his website Anti-Fascist Courier (Antifašistički Vjesnik), as well as in social networks such as Facebook. One of the main missions of the site is to challenge the hegemonic historic revisionism in Croatia, in which the far-right spreads lies denying the country’s role in the Holocaust, the genocide that occurred in the country, and the persecution of the Serbian people. The young man, Serbian and Croatian in origin, seeks to recount with historical fidelity the trajectory of his people, and exalts the role of the partisans, made up of Serbians, Jews, Romani, and other antifascists during World War II. However, the persecution to these groups still exists and demands resistance efforts. Another symbol of resistance in the country is the destruction of monuments and symbols that signify this history of persecution. This type of direct action occurs in both greater and smaller scales in the rest of the world as well, as exemplified in the United States and Brazil when statues commemorating colonizers are vandalized or destroyed.
From these histories, and the conclusion in the chapter “In Search of a Safe Place,” the author seeks to demonstrate that we are not safe from fascism, and that we have yet to turn this page in our history. On the contrary, fascism is stronger than ever, and is showing expressive numbers in ballots, for example.
But, like fascism, anti-fascism is also alive and spreading across the world. With an almost poetic narrative of various life stories, the five countries reported on here, both in their past and in contemporary times, shows us the importance of recognizing fascism among us and fighting back.
Reading Alerta! Alerta! and Confronting Fascism, it is possible to expand our debate and comprehension of fascism and antifascism. Both books give us the critical tools necessary to help us to comprehend current events across the world, in Europe, United States, and Brazil.
I think it is important to add to the discussion the term “social fascism,” coined by sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and further develop some reflections about some themes that are not explicitly shown in these books, but which supply elements of analysis for the discussion and debate, inviting both a global and a decentralized connection in the fight against fascism.
The term social fascism describes, for fascist societies (and governments) to be established, society itself needs to be in such a state of social apathy and amnesia that it will reproduce fascism, with daily microaggressions of symbolic, and later physical, elimination of minority groups. An example of this is the invisibility of street residents, culminating in acts such as the one that occurred in the Brazilian capital city, when Índio Galdino, a native leader, was burned alive in 1997, “mistaken” as a beggar by high class youth. (6) The result of this social fascism is observed in the ballot boxes across several countries, such as with the election of Donald Trump in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
The first level of this process involves so-called post-truth, or spreading fake news for the purpose of delegitimizing the credibility of one’s adversaries. This disinformation is disseminated through social networks, like Whatsapp and Twitter. Although lacking reliable sources, they are spread by people whom others trust. This creates smokescreens, leaving the actual candidates’ purposes and principles out of the public discourse, and often stirs up strong emotions in the population, such as the fear of the end of the family, traditions, and customs.
In the case of the US, we can point to the rumor that was widely spread during the 2016 Presidential election, that Hillary Clinton had a clone of herself. In Brazil, the main fake news was the rumor that candidate Fernando Haddad (from the social-democratic Worker’s Party) distributed gay-kits in school, including a penis-simulating bottle to teach pre-school children how to be gay. Although they are both unbelievable rumors, the public was bombarded by orchestrated attacks, using language and images capable of mobilizing a great part of the population through fear and horror. It was not a coincidence that Steve Bannon was a consultant for both campaigns.
The other level of the discourse is the construction of hate speech to attack minority and oppressed groups. Just like fear, hate is an emotion easily used to manipulate. Trump incited the population against immigrants, claiming that they would steal American jobs or that they would lead the country to bankruptcy because they would rely on social programs like food stamps. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Bolsonaro created a narrative that he was the only one who could protect the population from the communists, who wanted to invade people’s houses and pervert their children.
During the Brazilian elections, Bolsonaro said he would “exterminate petistas.” (7) The main symbol of his campaign was a gesture with hands simulating a gun. None of this, despite the clear violent symbols, caused any indignation in the population. Trump, despite the unscrupulous similarities with the Nazi ghettos, promised to build a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico. This resembles Hitler’s discourse about the risk of erasure of the Aryan race, generating in the German population (also replicated in other fascist countries like Italy and Spain) a sense of self-preservation that led them to accept any atrocity, driven by fear, a sense of horror, and hatred.
For governments to preach intolerance and persecution of minority groups, such as the Trump administration, this social acceptance is required. Nowadays, with the existence of social networks and false news, it spreads with alarming speed. This leads to a general feeling of naturalization and acceptance of barbarism, such as genocide of Black populations by the police, separation of undocumented immigrant families, construction of the now infamous wall, denial of the existence of trans people, and on and on.
The highlight of Confronting Fascism is its preservation of documents that predate the N30 WTO shutdown in Seattle, allowing us to understand not only how fascist ideology has spread across the country, but especially how the resistance has organized and reorganized. There generally exists some knowledge, even if not completely accurate on the part of mainstream media, of black bloc tactics. But antifa resistance goes beyond tactics. There is also constant situational analysis and convergence of ideas in developing tactics and strategies that address various moments, respecting specific cultural and historical characteristics. The Seattle protests of November ’99 demonstrated the will, urgency and determination to destroy the capitalist machine and create a different world. Those protests were merely the first step toward all sorts of demonstrations of dissatisfaction with the system across the country.
Some groups and organizations question the importance of keeping the antifa fight centered around revolutionary efforts. These two works analyzed in this essay are fundamental to demonstrating not only the efficiency of these tactics, but also their urgency in this particular moment. The antifa fight, at its core, is a broad and unrestricted fight to end capitalism, and with it, end of all related structural oppressions, such as gender oppression, white supremacy, xenophobia, and others. Ideally, the antifa fight connects ecologists, anarchists, workers, immigrants, refugees, women, trans people, people of color, and everyday people, independent of organizations. It is a cross-sectional fight that can unite us and drive us toward the construction of a new world. Fascism is, quintessentially, the enemy of humanity, and opposing it is an act of revolutionary courage, extremely necessary for the deliverance of every individual from material and symbolic oppressions.
Confronting Fascism was first published as a pamphlet in 2002 as a collaboration between Kersplebedeb, Anti-Racist Action (ARA) Chicago, and the Chicago-based anarchist magazine Arsenal. The authors themselves come from the Marxist tradition. They bring a deep analysis of the political aspects of fascism, as well as the organization of resistance movements. Xtn, who wrote the work’s introduction, soberly points out that there is a deficiency in Marxism to a serious critical approach, while recognizing the limits and faults of Marxism in taking the Left towards the type of radicalism necessary to definitively defeat the fascists Nazis, alt-right ,and white supremacists from the streets and society. Xtn invites the Left as a whole, including anarchists, to consider where we are going, and most importantly how and why, while also criticizing a lack of analysis on the roles of women in antifa. (8)
Yet these problems do not undermine the quality of the work (9). No book, essay, or pamphlet can exhaust a subject, especially one still unfolding. This makes reading these two works (10) even richer, since they dialogue with one another, showing the potential explored by distinct groups and situations, complementing each other and allowing us to have a broader outlook. Even with the deficiencies of Confronting Fascism, it is a courageous work that deserves to be read by anyone who is committed to ending fascism, not only in the United States, but on a global level.
For a wider analysis of contemporary fascism, one also has to also look at the advancement of the far-right in the countries of the global South. As a Brazilian, I cannot emphasize enough the role that Latin American dictatorships have had in the creation and consolidating fascism, creating institutions such as the Brazilian Military Police. When attempting to connect the Left’s struggles with the larger population, we have to contend with a lot of government propaganda that would call us “terrorists.” For example, several resistance fighters under dictatorships, such as Marighella in Brazil, were treated by their governments as terrorists. (11) Today, this attempt to criminalize resistance movements is backed by the normality of the period. During widespread protests in Brazil in 2013, (12) the greatest persecution fell upon anarchists, with the famous twenty-three political prisoners at Rio de Janeiro, whom the government tried to characterize as terrorists and enemies of the nation. (13)
The idea of a “war on terror” easily wins the hearts and minds of common citizens, hiding intentions that are not protective of the population, such as the US offensive in the Middle East (and, seemingly, possibly in Venezuela and elsewhere). Meanwhile, clearly terrorist actions undertaken by alt-right and fascist groups are minimized by official narratives. A stark example is the Norwegian case, when a shooter killed over seventy young leftist people in 2011, but the narrative centered around questioning his mental sanity, an artifice to hide its true political motivation, seeking to individualize the case as something committed by a madman, without any connection to the climate of terror that the far-right is spreading around the world.
Both of these books focus on the recent history of fascism, but they also mention fascism’s genesis in the post-WWI period, with the emergence Hitler and Mussolini. However, the most important aspect of both works is to explain the history of fascism in the twenty-first century. This should be a permanent alert: believing the danger of fascism is in the past will condemn us to relive the horror. We must resist, organize and fight with all available weapons, with militant discipline and theoretical accuracy, as there is no room for error before the fascist enemy.
Both books invite us to recognize that our liberating potential is in the fall of all borders, including borders of thought. Even as every place is unique, the fascist threat is a threat to humanity as a whole, be it in the Balkans or in the streets of Brooklyn. The enemy is lurking all around and demands us to be vigilant. Capital and repression know no boundaries, and our resistance tactics must have none as well. Beyond the European and North American experiences of both works, the revolutionary creativity must flow and mirror the antifascist movements of Africa, the Americas, and Asia, for our liberty does not fit within borders.
Cíntia Melo is an anarchist lawyer and writer with a Master’s in Architecture and Urbanism. She is Brazilian, and is involved with fights for the right to housing, transport, and the city, as well as gender equality. She has been involved with political organizations and social movements, living and fighting in different countries, such as Brazil, Argentina, and the United States.
This review is from the Imaginations issue of Perspectives (n.31) and is available from Powell’s Books here! and AK Press here!
Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement is available from AK Press here.
Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe’s Antifascist Struggle is available from AK Press here.
Notes
(1) Don Hamerquist, J. Sakai, and Mark Salotte. 2017. Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement. Kersplebedeb.
(2) Attention to the fact that this is not a generalization regarding Muslims, or any religious groups, but a criticism to specific groups that enforce authoritarian and/or terror practices.
(3) Ibid., p. 149.
(4) Patrick Strickland. 2018. Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe’s Anti-Fascist Struggle. Edinburgh: AK Press.
(5) Boaventura de Sousa Santos. 2003. “Poderá o Direito Ser Emancipatório?” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, no. 65 (May): 03-76. https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.1180.
(Available in Portuguese).
(6) Cíntia Melo. 2018. “População de Rua: entre a exclusão e a justiça social. (Homelessness: from exclusion to social justice)”. Direitos Fundamentais Das Pessoas Em Situação de Rua. Edited by Ada Pellegrini Grinover. Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Universidade De Itaúna; D’Plácido.
(7) Petista is an expression that refers to the supporters of Brazil’s Workers Party (PT), but it is often used as a slur to refer to leftists in general, even without any connection with PT.
(8) Xtn of Chicago ARA
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Carlos Marighella (Salvador, December 5, 1911 – São Paulo, November 4, 1969) was a Brazilian Marxist-Leninist communist politician, writer and guerrillero. He was one of the main organizers of the armed groups that fought against the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985), Marighella was considered the most important enemy of the regime. He was the co-founder of Ação Libertadora Nacional, a revolutionary organization active in Brazil during the military dictatorship.
(12) A series of protests happened all over Brazil in June (2013), especially in the eleven cities chosen to host the World Cup (2014), those events were called Jornadas de Junho (June’s Journeys). Some of the protests lead more than one million people to the streets.
(13) Twenty-three anarchists were persecuted by the government in Rio de Janeiro accused of different crimes during the protest of June, 2013. They were convicted (each one faced different charges), and they are now appealing.
“And then Richard Spencer got punched in the face, right? Which was an amazing moment in comedic history…because, I don’t know if you know, Richard Spencer was being interviewed and in the interview he was asked about his Pepe the Frog badge. So he was trying to explain a meme and then out of nowhere, a hero came along…and punched him in the face, instantly turning him into a meme. It was like casting a spell.”1
Aamer Rahman, comedian, “Is it really OK to punch Nazis?”
White nationalism is a serious and dangerous social movement, dedicated to the creation of a white nation-state. In many terrifying ways white nationalists are successfully organizing in a range of spaces and communities. In fact, many activists agree they are outorganizing our anti-fascist and anti-racist efforts. As Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, stated recently: “Sit with that for a second…we are totally being outorganized by the other side.”2It is critical not only to take the threat of white nationalism seriously, but also to calibrate our various forms of resistance to say NO to white nationalism in every way possible, and also to refuse how they are mobilizing and organizing. This piece focuses on how white nationalists are mobilizing through culture and pleasure, and argues that in addition to developing robust counterorganizing strategies, we must also cultivate our own forms of cultural and anti-fascist pleasure organizing.
If You Don’t They Will is a group that has been researching, supporting, and creating cultural organizing strategies to counter white nationalism for over two decades. This includes creating spaces to generate visions, desires, incantations, actions, memes, and dreams for the kinds of worlds we want to live in. In order to shape these kinds of spaces, people need to be more embodied and move into their physical, somatic, emotional, and affective perceptions and intelligences from which anti-fascist dreams and worldbuilding strategies are realized and made possible. If You Don’t They Will offers these sensibilities as an anti-fascist politics of pleasure.
In our years as cultural organizers, it has been an ongoing challenge to engage people in taking seriously how affect and feelings are politicizing for white nationalist social movement organizing. It has also been consistently difficult to get workshop participants to recognize the importance of centering feelings, bodies, and relationships in our own anti-racist and anti-fascist movement building. If You Don’t They Will recognizes that feelings, affective relationships, and emotive networks are political and politicizing for all social movements. As Brian Massumi suggests, “with affect, the political becomes directly felt”;this felt-sense is vital to fueling anti-fascist fantasies and present-day resistance efforts to strengthen our own movements.3When we step back, listen to our bodies, connect to our political histories, and ask “What time is it?”4 again and again, we return to the reality that we desperately need to feel an anti-fascist politics of pleasure.
“A power to affect and be affected is a potential to move, act, perceive, and think—in a word, powers of existence. The ‘to be affected’ part of the definition says that a body’s powers of existence are irreducibly relational […]Affect is fundamentally transindividual.”5
Brian Massumi, “Histories of Violence: Affect, Power, Violence–the Political is Not Personal”
Our workshop offers a critical understanding of how white nationalism is a social movement that uses a diverse array of aesthetics, methods, discourses, and modes of perception, creating a multiplicity of access points for different people to join the movement. This social movement’s end goal is not simply “to spread hate,” but to take over the state with the dream of building a white homeland through a range of violent strategies including genocide.6
How do we begin this teaching? With imagination-instigating exercises that ask people to use their senses, intuitions, and assumptions to identify white nationalists in a series of images that feature people doing different activities. The purpose is to surface the misconceptions about the white nationalist movement that, we argue, leads to ineffective and problematic counterorganizing, and to then suggest a new (anti-fascist) framework. In every workshop participants have difficulty identifying white nationalists who are having fun or engaging in community-based pleasure activities such as running a marathon, BBQing at a family picnic, hosting knitting circles, playing music shows, making art, or doing crafts. Instead, participants’ primary mode of identifying white nationalists is by looking for “hate” and the activities/expressions/fashions associated with “hating.”
This affective association arises for a few reasons. The normative framework for recognizing a white nationalist or white nationalist activity and its violence tends to be based in the dangerous assumption that these are aberrant, uneducated, poor, rural, traumatized, “crazy” individual men whose primary motivation and agency is rooted solely in fear and hate (not crafts and craft cocktails). Thinking of white nationalism as only a handful of “hateful” individuals, and not as a social movement, makes for ineffective counterorganizing and stymies our anti-fascist worldbuilding visions. Further, the notion that all white nationalists are motivated solely or primarily by fear and hate ignores both the myriad access points through which people enter and engage the social movement, and the other powerful affective experiences offered through participation. An anti-fascist politics of pleasure expands our analysis and helps us develop a wider range of nuanced, nimble, and adaptable strategies for smashing white nationalism. At the same time, an anti-fascist politics of pleasure keeps our attention on dreaming anti-fascist futures.
“What concerns me is […] the very distinction between good and bad feelings that presumes that bad feelings are backward and conservative and good feelings are forward and progressive.”7
—Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects”
It is often inconceivable to workshop participants that feelings (other than fear and hate), affect, and relationship building are central components of white nationalist organizing. Reading Sara Ahmed’s quote in this context suggests white nationalism is seemingly on one end of the spectrum alongside hate, anger, fear, and rage, while pleasure, intimacy, connection, belonging, joy, and happiness are polarized on the other end, presumably associated with liberal, progressive, and/or radical movements. The assumption, then, is that good feelings, strong social relationships, and emotive networks are the terrain of “the Left.” This renders invisible all of the pleasure (that no one wants to acknowledge) that white nationalism mobilizes in politicizing ways.
Yes: fear, a sense of victimization, paranoid conspiracy theories based in anti-Semitism, and white entitlement are central feelings, powerful access points, and primary tenets for organizing and growing a fascist social movement. But just as on “the Left,” we suggest it is also pleasurable feelings that, in Massumi’s words, “overspill the individual” body to connect across bodies, creating ongoing commitments, sensibilities, and identities that cohere this movement.
In other words, pleasure is a binding agent for both “the Left” and “the Right.” Pleasure makes social movements grow and expand. It increases resiliency, curiosity, a sense of connection, wholeness, and togetherness. Pleasure is what makes visioning other worlds and the futures we want possible. Until we can wrap our heads around the fact that white nationalism also organizes bodies and affective relationships through pleasure, our counterstrategies that rely solely on debate, logic, and condescension will never be vibrant enough to reach and/or compete8 for the communities white nationalists are targeting, nor with the narratives of belonging (and not belonging) they are peddling. Trickery, pranks, comedic mockery, playful sabotage, strategic and snarky shaming, and other forms of mischievous culture jamming are all a part of anti-fascist pleasure politics. These political practices are informed by sensibilities that interrupt the mainstreaming of white nationalism, amplify our worldbuilding imaginations, and reorient bodies towards a more somatic relationship to the worlds we are working to create.
“You could feel how angry they were but also how happy they were to be doing this. To be intimidating people […] it was just this happy rage.”9
Emily Gorcenski, an anti-racist activist describing being attacked by white nationalists during the torchlight parade, in Documenting Hate: Charlottesville
While white nationalism certainly feeds on feelings of fear and hate, as well as the foundational feelings of victimization, psychological manipulation (by a fictional Jewish cabal), and superiority, there is also snark, joy, comedic mockery, and pleasure. There can be individual pleasure in these feelings themselves, but also a pleasure that grows emotive networks and affective relationships, strengthening the movement through the binding agent of different kinds of belongings. Some pleasure bonds are through feelings of being underdogs and participating in and growing countercultures. These affective connections are built and strengthened through a perceived shared state of being wronged by a “common enemy.”10 In other words, there can be pleasure in being wronged, hated, vilified, or being the outcast.
Some find pleasure in the strategy of electoral organizing or establishing businesses, starting schools, curating art galleries, and mainstreaming their particular version of white nationalism. Others find pleasure in teaching and mentoring, while others too find pleasure in cultural organizing such as planning music tours, spearheading events at county fairs, survivalist trainings, study groups, or hiking and gardening clubs. There is pleasure in being part of something secret and underground and there is pleasure in mainstreaming a cause. It bears repeating, white nationalism is a social movement that offers a variety of different, often pleasurable access points, whose affective binding agent is their fantasy of “who is American” (“white”) and what they want America to look like (a “white only” nation-state).11
If we understand white nationalism as a social movement, we have to take seriously the depth and breadth of its cultural organizing. Cultural organizing creates integral spaces (physical, virtual, imaginary) where these social relationships are forged and strengthened through affective, emotional, and often pleasurable experiences that develop formative and politicizing connections and identities. White nationalists may also rely on fear and hate to forge solidarities and identities, sometimes simultaneously or interchangeably with pleasure. So, while fear and hate are the more obvious feelings white nationalists mobilize through, it would be a mistake not to also attend to the powerful role cultural organizing and pleasure play in recruiting, mainstreaming, and strengthening their efforts. We cannot forget that they too are intent on making their movement irresistible.
Their cultural organizing may or may not be obviously white nationalist, but will attend to the pleasures of connection, relationships, community building, belonging and family. People do not need to be hardcore white nationalists, believe in the rhetoric, or know all of the racist scientific “facts,” to be affected and feel connected to the larger white nationalist social movement. Sometimes, ideology follows affect where affected bodies become conduits to eventually “thinking” like a white nationalist.
It can be easy to dismiss fascist sewing circles, bowling parties, or dinner clubs. But these activities affectively move and politicize bodies in powerful ways that we must take seriously, as they are the relational and cultural glue for a dangerous and violent movement. We do this by recognizing and disrupting the various access points white nationalists mobilize in and through, by generating our own binding agents and emotive networks, and by centering fun and pleasure in our movement work. As long-time organizer and visionary Scot Nakagawa put it: “don’t let the haters steal your joy.”12 Pleasure is the lifeline that sustains our resistances and makes our dreams possible. An anti-fascist politics of pleasure, then, refuses all iterations of white nationalist organizing in no uncertain terms, fiercly commits to our pleasure and joy, andmore generally strengthens our abilities to fight white nationalism by making our organizing cultures irresistible, contagious, expansive, and generative. All of these aspects are vital to dreaming anti-fascist futures.
“[P]leasure evokes change—perhaps more than shame. More precisely, where shame makes us freeze and try to get really small and invisible, pleasure invites us to move, to open, to grow.”13
In the current political moment, pleasure can be dismissed as naive, indulgent, escapist, frivolous, and not “the real work.” It can be something to be suspicious of and tends to be associated with being compromised and/or undedicated. Pleasure, and the bodies that feel it, are then seen as things to manage, discipline, and master, and are often positioned as the opposite of political agency. For years, our motto and central organizing practice has been, “Have Fun! Fight Fascism!” And yet, though we work in a wide range of spaces with varied communities, organizations, and institutions, pushback on “fun” as critical to fighting fascism has been a recurring concern. To be clear, If You Don’t They Will in no way takes any white nationalist activity lightly. What we are committed to is an anti-fascist politics of pleasure that recognizes the importance of play, fun, humor, art, snark, and embodied practices that are essential to interrupting numbing, fear, and freezing. Anti-fascist worldbuilding requires not only our NOs, or what we are resisting, smashing, and contesting, but also requires a vision of our YESes–the kinds of relationships, communities, neighborhoods, workplaces, and family structures that we actually want to live and engage in. We need pleasure in order to develop creative, fierce and resilient NOs and YESes.
Additionally, there is often a longing for a “quick fix” or a “checklist” of guaranteed effective strategies for countering white nationalism. Our anti-fascist politics of pleasure speaks back to and reorients away from both of these related tensions. An anti-fascist politics of pleasure is a sensibility. It is not a comprehensive list nor will it provide examples of specific tactics that guarantee immediate success, where pleasure then happens only after “the work.” It is an embodied political imaginary, a way of relating to the world and to each other; a mode of being curious, and a commitment to developing emotive relationships to past, present, and future anti-fascist struggles. An anti-fascist politics of pleasure resists the notion that “we can have fun after we win.” The reality is, we won’t win (and we aren’t winning) without pleasure.
It is through the senses that people are affected, politicized, and moved to do more traditionally recognized modes of political labor. To be clear, we are not just talking about a single pleasurable event or experience. Our idea of pleasure isn’t about always feeling good, being uncritically optimistic, or giving up our struggles against violence and oppression.
Pleasure is about feeling more, in the present moment, while also powerfully connecting to the past and the future. Pleasure is expansive, allowing bodies to feel a wider range of emotions: from shame, bitterness, jealousy, and insecurity to joy, contentment, connection, and peacefulness. We need pleasure to sustain and connect us, for as adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy, “There is pleasure in community and interdependence. It feels good together.”14
Pleasure is key to being fully present in the here and now, and is vital for dreaming and building anti-fascist futures. While we counter white nationalists’ affective (pleasure) organizing, we need to be growing our own. We are, in very critical ways, fighting for pleasure.
Cristien Storm and Kate Boyd are two Seattle-based white anti-racist cultural organizers and co-founders of If You Don’t They Will, a long-time collaboration that provides creative and concrete tools for countering white nationalism through a cultural lens. This includes creating spaces to generate visions, hopes, desires, and dreams for the kinds of worlds we want to live in.
This essay is from the Imaginations issue of Perspectives (n.31) and is available from Powell’s Books here! and AK Press here!
Notes
Aamer Rahman, “Is it really OK to punch Nazis?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKICKcMU3MU
Interview with Alicia Garza. United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell, Episode 2 Season 4, “Not All White People” on CNN (May 5, 2019). https://www.cnn.com/shows/united-shades-of-america.
“Histories of Violence: Affect, Power, Violence–The Political is Not Personal. Brad Evans Interviews Brian Massumi.” Los Angeles Review of Books (November 13, 2017). https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-affect-power-violence-the-political-is-not-personal/#!
Many have written about how Grace Lee Boggs often began meetings with, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” emphasizing the necessity of ongoing critical reflection in our movement work, by integrating practices of interconnected self-consciousness. Scot Nakagawa and Tarso Ramos ask “what time is it?” in their important essay, “What Time Is It? Why We Can’t Ignore the Momentum of the Right.” Political Research Associates (July 14, 2016). https://www.politicalresearch.org/2016/07/14/what-time-is-it-why-we-cant-ignore-the-momentum-of-the-right/
“Histories of Violence: Affect, Power, Violence–The Political is Not Personal. Brad Evans Interviews Brian Massumi.” Los Angeles Review of Books (November 13, 2017). https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-affect-power-violence-the-political-is-not-personal/#!
“The goal of white nationalism is not to spread hate but to seize the State using bigotry to build mass movements and to build power and fear.” Eric K. Ward, Executive Director of Western States Center, quoted from his talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LODRhNDUEG8
Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 50.
If You Don’t They Will often encounters the (ineffective and at times condescending) strategy of “changing their individual hearts and minds,” which ignores and minimizes the reality that white nationalists are dedicated activists committed to their cause and social movement (just like we are). As Cristien Storm often says in our workshops: “They couldn’t ever change my mind or make me believe in white supremacy; why would we think we could change their minds? It is not always about facts and data, it’s emotional.”
Anti-Semitism is a binding agent between the wide range of disparate white nationalist groups, in which Jews are the perceived “common enemy” responsible for manipulating the policies, social movements, and communities that supposedly victimize white nationalists. For more see Eric Ward’s “Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism,” http://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemitism-animates-white-nationalism/ and Scot Nakagawa’s “Antisemitism is Racism,” https://www.racefiles.com/2019/01/13/antisemitism-is-racism/
As a white identity politics movement, white nationalists are working to continually redefine “whiteness” in contemporary contexts; anti-fascist and anti-racist organizers need to understand “whiteness” as a contested category and recognize the inextricable ways white supremacy is embedded in and gives meaning through other categories of social difference, including gender, sexuality, class, and religion. We need to contest “whiteness” in order to smash it.
Scot Nakagawa, “Three people in the last week have complained about being harassed after pissing off potentially violent right wingers […] Here’s how I’ve made a joyful life in spite of the haters…” Facebook, January 10, 2019.
adrienne maree brown, “Introduction,” in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Oakland: AK Press, 2017), 21. As this piece goes into its final stages of revision, we eagerly await adrienne maree brown’s new book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good.
brown, 22.
A friend of mine, a Trump supporter, recently sent me a social media post from an anonymous Seattle police officer about the “organized protest” zone, or autonomous zone, established by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The officer argues, in part, that “there is a part of our country that is no longer under our control,” and that “we [the police] have been castrated.” The post is mostly filed with misinformation, that the protest space has its own currency, ID system, and that the former police precinct, abandoned by the mayor and the city at the height of the protests, is being used as a BLM headquarters – no doubt a kind of black witches coven in their imagination. Indeed, in the language used in the post, “terrorists” and “anarchists” are stock piling “ammo and chemical weapons,” and are headed by a “warlord” who “drives a tesla and has been arrested for drugs, guns, pimping and crimes against children.” The officer concludes that “this is real,” and that “you can’t make this up.” These developments they call “unthinkable.”
The police are not the only ones hysterical at the loss of their station. Right wing media have also chimed in, exacerbating and stoking the fears of the Right. Fox media personality, Tucker Carlson, for example, bloviates on his nightly show that the founders of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) are “just like the conquistadors” because they’ve seized and occupied already established land and are extorting local businesses. Not to be outdone, President Trump, searching for an election year issue, called on the city of Seattle to attack and retake the space. He tweeted angerly, “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stopped IMMEDIATELY.”
What is unthinkable, or was at the beginning of the month, is the power of the Black Lives Matter movement in the streets. The emergence of the autonomous zone is a pinnacle of that power, a significant victory. It demonstrates the ability of popular power to win the impossible from structures of white supremacy – the state and the propertied interests they represent. That victory, and the subsequent diminution of state violence, is a major step forward for community self-control and autonomy. It shows that ending anti-Black violence is the first and most basic step to honoring Black life.
But it is just the beginning. Honoring Black life means constructing a society where Black autonomy and Black power are the cornerstones of community, and one where Black freedom is the foundation for broader, collective liberation. The advent of the movement’s autonomous zone was a step in that direction. Taking the city’s east police precinct demonstrates not only that our movements can win, but we can win previously unimaginable victories for Black lives.
There is another legacy now that must be dealt with from the CHOP. Much uglier, it is about the violence that took one life and left several in critical condition in a series of recent shootings. The shootings and the lack of direction for the space sadly demonstrate that our movements are not yet mature enough to know what to do with victory. As I write, the Seattle police are threatening to retake the building in the wake of the violence.
The shootings happened as the movement languished. With no clear direction, political, strategic, and tactical infighting broke out, reminiscent of Occupy Wall Street’s failures. Questions emerged over whether the encampment was for abolition or reform, taking the police station or not, “autonomy” or remaking existing institutions, marching or occupying, and others. This infighting was rooted in a lack of decision-making process that made even the most basic agreements impossible to gain collective consent.
In the autonomous zone, a diverse flowering of self-activity emerged, a variegated patchwork of mutual aid projects, support, care, and action that reflected the full diversity of the movement’s politics and people. That beautiful moment must not be lost in its downfall, but now with violence in the space, it must also be held within a more complex picture of the movement’s failures as well.
First, the victory
Having the city abandon the precinct was a huge victory for the Black freedom movement in Seattle. It came after weeks of fierce clashes with police. The weekend after the murder of George Floyd saw confrontational and angry downtown riots that burned police vehicles, broke store windows, and looted merchandise. Quickly, a city curfew was imposed. Instead of dying, the protests turned into even larger mobilizations across the city and the region, even in small, mostly white bedroom communities.
Tens of thousands of people marched. On Wednesday, June 3rd, the sixth day of protests, BLM and anti-criminalization organizers from Block the Bunker, No New Youth Jail, and Decriminalize Seattle issued a series of simple and direct demands to the mayor and marched with tens of thousands to City Hall. They helped establish the goals of the protests as 1) cutting the city police budget 50%, 2) refunding community needs, and 3) releasing those arrested during protests. This marked a huge advance for the movement; the protests now had clear, ambitious demands.
The action at City Hall also put the crosshairs squarely on Mayor Jenny Durkan, with increasing calls for her resignation. The demonstrations continued throughout the week, high school students formed impromptu marches that turned into street occupations. Actions of thousands popped up in unexpected parts of the city, like the mostly white, and affluent northern sector. In the Othello neighborhood, a poorer and Blacker part of the city, organizers filled Othello park with thousands, fists in the air, chanting “Black Lives Matter.”
Meanwhile, in Capitol Hill, nightly clashes with the police were escalating. Every evening thousands gathered at police barricades constructed to protect the east police precinct building. These actions came on news that Minneapolis had burned to the ground one of their police stations. Overwhelmed, outnumbered, and exhausted, police used aggressive tactics, often charging into the crowd to push back the throngs of protestors. One young woman was hospitalized, her heart stopped after getting hit the chest with an exploding flash-bang grenade. Tear gas stung the air until one or two in the morning. This continued night after night.
Momentum, Power
Widely criticized for the aggressive approach the police took, in which child protestors were maced by riot cops, and other protestors tackled and beaten, the mayor was under intense scrutiny, and seeming to lose control over the situation. On Friday, June 5th Mayor Durkan promised a 30-day moratorium on the use of tear gas. But the very next night the police again gassed people in the streets protesting. City council members announced calls for the mayor to resign, and began drafting official statements. On Sunday, protestors continued to gain power, as the situation further spiraled out of the mayor’s control. That evening, a young man, and relative of a Seattle police officer, drove his car into the protest, shot one man in the arm, before surrendering to police lines. At the same time, President Trump was stoking the Right to shoot “looters” in the streets.
Then the bombshell. In a surprise announcement on Monday, June 8th, Chief Carmen Best said the police would vacate the precinct at the center of the Capital Hill protests. On Twitter moving vans were seen removing equipment from the station. The withdrawal was a huge victory for the movement, and likely saved Durkan’s position as mayor, for a time.
That night demonstrators again gathered at the station, this time coming right up to the walls of the building. Uncertain what to do, and fearing a trap, BLM demonstrators did not occupy the station. Rumors that armed gangs of Proud Boys were ready to attack demonstrators, possibly circulated by the police, led to people seeking to protect the area around the east precinct. Late in the night on June 8th demonstrators declared the area a police-free autonomous zone. By the next day, hundreds rushed into the space to establish an infrastructure of occupation that allowed residents and protestors to stay, and kept the violence of the police out.
Instantly the character of the neighborhood transformed. From a space filled with nightly clashes punctuated by police violence, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) as it was initially called, demonstrated a flowering of art, mutual aid, music, direct democracy, and self-sufficiency. Without the violence of the police, people organized their lives and their neighborhood in ways that suited their interests and priorities. These were all humane, focused on defending and honoring Black life; many were quite beautiful.
The toppling of the east precinct was a huge victory. Not only because it demonstrated that people had the power in the streets to oust the mayor, and beat back police violence, but because it opened the horizon as to what kind of neighborhood, city, and society we could create and live in.
No Direction
The victory of the CHAZ soon came to be undone by the lack of political maturity of the movement to capitalize on victory. This is not about unity, but maturity: the ability to navigate political difference and move forward on shared interests for collective liberation. Indeed, as soon became clear, there was little ability to discuss the pressing strategic and logistical concerns in the space.
Instead, people just started doing – hundreds and thousands of people working on hundreds of individual and collective projects. This included a community garden for Black and Indigenous lives, nightly concerts and political rallies, documentary film screenings, a veritable renaissance of street art, a “decolonial” café, and more. For the movement, there were nightly marches to other police precincts, and people used the autonomous zone for meetings, political conversations, popular education, and abolition work.
Even in the early days of the zone however, there were problems evident. The biggest was that there was no space to have collective decision making to shape agreed upon priorities. A general assembly did emerge, but it was very difficult to get things done. It became more of a speak-out, with people voicing impassioned testimonials against the police, but not able to raise political or strategic questions with each other. This was partially because few had experience facilitating large meetings, forming agendas, setting short time limits for debate, and having the discipline to silence or remove those who were off topic and disruptive. This was exacerbated by police infiltrators who acted to divert, distract, and make focused conversation more difficult.
In addition, there were significant political differences difficult to overcome. Changing the name from CHAZ to CHOP – Capitol Hill Organized Protest – was reflective of this. Very early, there were voices raised that the autonomous zone was a distraction, that it took away from the movement for Black lives, that the focus became holding space, rather than stopping police violence, and that it was dominated by white activists. There are merits to these claims. Still other voices, many of them Black, questioned the focus on “autonomy,” arguing that as African Americans they sought not autonomy from the institutions of the country, but integration, respect, and a dignified existence within. Again, with merit.
There were differences between Black voices, and for white ally politics this posed a quandary – whose voices to prioritize?Some Black and POC organizers were talking with the police, making suggestions to lead marches away from the zone, or to make other concessions with the cops including allowing street traffic access or in other ways limiting and restricting the autonomous zone. While other Black voices were more militant, defended the notion of an autonomous zone, and challenged the more conservative Black organizers. Others were frustrated by the whole debate over the name and looked for a clearer strategic orientation for what to do with the precinct, the autonomous zone, and what could be won from the police. Part of this confusion was also because most of the established radical Black leadership was organizing elsewhere, putting their efforts into other mobilizations in the city.
Then people started shooting. On Juneteenth one man died after a fight in the CHOP. The next night there was another. And a few days later, yet another still. Several people were sent to the hospital in critical condition. While one victim said his assailants were white supremacists who were lurking near the space, most of the shootings stemmed from internal personal conflicts that spiraled into violence.
In the most recent days, Mayor Durkan and Chief Best have done their darndest to capitalize on the situation, calling for the occupants to voluntarily leave, marshalling conservative Black leadership for support, and waiting for people to disperse enough to get the precinct back. These are tense and troubling moments. Meanwhile, people in the zone cannot agree on strategy at this critical juncture. Some are arguing in favor of leaving, others, for holding the space at all costs.
How to Castrate a Bull
The fact that the police express feeling “castrated” with the victory of the movements for Black lives, underscores the synthesis of racism, patriarchy, violence, and state power. The police, the president, and the Far Right loath the loss of the precinct and the creation of the organized protest space because it is a significant defeat of their power, their values, their way of life. In the words of one Seattle police officer, they’ve lost control of their own country.
Their defeat is our victory.
The emergence of the autonomous zone shows that the limits of what mass movements can accomplish are shaped only by the limits of our power in the streets, and the limits of our imaginations for what is possible. The collective and humane values expressed in the zone are cause for celebration, a source of beauty. Black life can be honored when the institutions of white supremacy, like the police, are not reformed, but removed. In their absence we can create a space where Black voices are honored, where Black life truly matters.
But the legacy of the organized protest zone is more complicated than a simple and straightforward celebration. The emergence of violence in the space is a gift to the Right. They can argue that policing is necessary and that the excesses of movements must be checked.
For us, the failures demonstrate that basic meeting facilitation, lack of ability to engage with complication and complexity, and allowing for difference while working on projects of shared interest are very serious shortcomings that require quick resolution. Further, it reveals that politics are important. The ideas and visions we have in our heads are what enable us to set future horizons of freedom.
Thankfully, there is much more movement in front of us, and whatever happens to the autonomous zone, the movement for Black lives can push forward in a multitude of directions. We’ve already seen it here in Seattle. In the last week the police union has been ousted from the labor council. Armed police have been forbidden from schools. Police budgets will be cut and their use of an array of weapons banned. We must act to create sites free of police violence in the other institutions and zones of the city. We can build from one autonomous zone, to many. Even if the CHOP dies, autonomy continues to grow.
Michael Reagan is a historian and activist in Seattle. He is the author of the forthcoming Intersectional Class Struggle: Theory and Practice to be published by the IAS and AK press. Find him on Twitter at @reaganrevoltion
