Archive for category: IAS

May Day, 1987: thousands of black-clad Autonomen (“those who are autonomous”) riot in West Berlin. After a decade spent honing their street-fighting tactics, they stage an offensive against state repression by blocking streets, occupying buildings, and fighting a low-intensity urban war against the police. The Autonomen expand their liberated zone throughout much of the neighborhood of Kreuzberg that is their base. After a night of rebellious jubilation, they return to their squatted houses and social centers to nurse their wounds, curse the police, and celebrate a temporary victory. Although the German media depict the Autonomen as little more than violent mobs whose only motivation is destruction, the radicals have simultaneously constructed an extensive network of squatted alternative infrastructure across West Berlin and throughout West Germany.

During the 1980s, the Autonomen turned hundreds of abandoned buildings into group housing, social centers, movement bars, and cultural centers—spaces that provided both alternative forms of living and bases of attack. At their best, the squats constituted urban liberated territory in which thousands of young people practiced a communism of everyday life. More recently, in France, the Invisible Committee has drawn on the German autonomous experiences to theorize the commune as a destituent space of everyday communism. In this view, communes do not form a constituent power whose aim is to establish a new order with more representative state institutions. Rather, drawing on Giorgio Agamben, the Invisible Committee argues that communes destitute the state (i.e., render it inoperative and powerless) by challenging the need for state institutions. Development of new communal forms of life outside the state and capitalism provides the basis for “suppressing them in a positive way. To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution, but to attack the need we have of it.”(1) It is in this sense that communes provide the material foundation to “live communism” and attack the rule of capitalism and the state.

The Invisible Committee is a collective of post-autonomist communists (formerly operating under the moniker Tiqqun) who trace their intellectual lineage through Italian Autonomia and the German Autonomen, among others. Though born in the Parisian squatting scene, they grew disillusioned with the radical subcultural milieu and moved to the tiny town of Tarnac, where they live communally and collectively run a farm, bar, and general store. They were introduced to the American popular imagination primarily through the controversy surrounding their book The Coming Insurrection (2007, 2009), which Glenn Beck featured on his Fox News show, as well as engagement from friendlier groups like Endnotes and CrimethInc. The Invisible Committee continued to develop their particular variety of post-autonomist communization theory in To Our Friends (2014), which reflects on the European movements of the squares and associated spectacular, short-lived insurrections (especially in Greece). Their latest book, Now (2017), explores the possibilities and practices of communism within the fragmented world of capitalism. Although the collective is relatively widely read, their historical and theoretical background is less well known in the United States.

This article combines historical insights from the Autonomen with theoretical interventions from the Invisible Committee in order to make several related arguments. First, the commune form creates alternative worlds in which liberalism is combatted and collective struggle against alienation takes place. Second, communes operate according to a unique spatial logic that ruptures capitalist geography, promotes new spatial practices, and establishes non-alienated inhabitation of territory. Third, the Autonomen and the Invisible Committee theorize and act upon a new conception of communism as a collective practice of living the “good life” in revolutionary struggle rather than as solely a (future) economic system. Fourth, alternative infrastructure provides the means to practice this in daily life. Finally, revolutionary practice entails networks of autonomous communes seceding from the capitalist system to form liberated territories that function as bases from which to attack capitalist state power.

 

1. The Commune Form

“The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality. . . . All power to the communes!”

– The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (117, 133)

 

The commune centers two core components: an anti-individualistic collective bond and a concomitant radical transformation of everyday life. In liberal ideology, which is grounded in the capitalist marketplace, human community is reduced to unmoored individuals who are forever in competition. In the face of this atomization, communes are formed around the desire to carry out collective projects. Communes arise when we transform our relationships with each other and face the world together. As the Invisible Committee defines it, “what constitutes the commune is the mutual oath sworn . . . to stand together as a body . . . a commune was a pact to face the world together. It meant relying on one’s own shared powers as the source of one’s freedom. What was aimed for in this case was not an entity; it was a qualitative bond, and a way of being in the world.”(2) Communes construct community out of isolation and replace individualism with collective self-determination and well-being. They form when groups of individuals attempt to directly “communize” their lives (put them in common) and face the problems of the world together.

Although capitalism has colonized every aspect of our lives, it is possible to resist and collectively establish alternatives. As radical geographer Alexander Vasudevan puts it in his book on squatting in Berlin, “the squat was a place of collective world-making; a place to imagine alternative worlds. . . . At stake here was the opportunity to build an alternative habituswhere the very practice of ‘occupation’ became the basis for producing a different sense of shared city life.”(3) Accordingly, the Invisible Committee argues that communes “immediately organize a shared form of life” according to alternative values.(4) As one activist put it, “Aspiring [to] autonomy means first of all to struggle against political and moral alienation in life and work. . . . It means to reclaim our lives.”(5) Further, as the historian of autonomous movements George Katsiaficas explains, “the Autonomen seek to live according to a new set of norms and values within which everyday life and all of civil society can be transformed. Beginning with overt political beliefs, they seek to change isolated individuals into members of collectives within which egalitarian relationships can be created. . . . Their collective forms negate atomization.”(6) The Autonomen organized around those collective values and everyday practices rather than a rigid ideology or party-line.

The Autonomen approached everyday life according to their values of self-determination, equality, and autonomy. Drawing from Italian Autonomia and the German autonomous women’s movement, they employed a “politics of the first person,” rather than a Marxist orientation towards the proletariat or an anti-imperialist one for Third World national liberation.(7) In line with this foundational belief, autonomous activists emphasized self-determination within subcultures over traditional workplace struggle, embraced a “vague anarchism,” and called for “no power to no one.” Although they critiqued the “alternative movement” for its willingness to exist alongside capitalism, they emphasized the need to build alternative worlds that would form a basis to fight against the ruling order. The Autonomen organized themselves organically in small, non-hierarchical groups that faced everyday problems collectively and came together for larger actions. They sought to establish the possibility and reality of an autonomous, lived communism.

2. The Spatial and Cultural Production of Communes

“Every declared commune calls a new geography into existence around it.”

– The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends (229)

 

Communes challenge the spatial order of the capitalist world, establish an inhabited territoriality, and provide a setting for experimental spatial practices. Social space is important to contest because it performs an important material and ideological function for liberalism. As the Invisible Committee explain, “We inherit from modernity a conception of space as an empty, uniform, and measurable expanse where objects, creatures, or landscapes occupy their place. But the sensible world does not present itself to us in that way. Space is not neutral. . . . Places are irreducibly loaded—with stories, impressions, emotions.”(8) Capitalist space presents itself as a non-political, static stage upon which the narrative events of history take place. But neoliberalism has fragmented the space of capitalism, and the Invisible Committee identifies a “new spatial ordering of the world.” In their most recent work, they posit fragmentation as the defining feature of contemporary social life, arguing that “we are the contemporaries of a prodigious reversal of the process of civilization into a process of fragmentation.”(9) Fragmentation occurs on every level: Fordism becomes post-Fordism; the modern capitalist spatial organization of cities splinters; the last vestiges of collectivity, sociality, and non-market values are destroyed as humanity fragments into the “Needy Opportunists” who interact through screens. This fragmentation provides the situation with which communes engage. Communes challenge fragmentation while mobilizing it for their own aims towards a new, inhabited spatiality.

Against the fragmented, unmoored movement of capital, communes propagate a logic of inhabitation. Over the course of centuries, capital has become increasingly detached from physical territory. Against capitalist abstraction,

the commune regards itself first of all as a concrete, situated rupture with the overall order of the world. The commune inhabits its territory—that is, it shapes it just as much as the territory offers it a dwelling place and a shelter. It forms the necessary ties there, it thrives on its memory, it finds a meaning, a language, in the land. . . An intensely inhabited territory ends up becoming an affirmation in itself, an articulation, an expression of the life that’s lived there.(10)

Inhabitation of communes aims to make territory impenetrable to dominant power. By increasing the number of free spaces, deepening the connections and circulations between them, and overcoming our reliance on capitalist infrastructure, “the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory.”(11) This is a diametrically opposed orientation to space from that of liberalism and capitalism.

Communes propagate an autonomous logic of geography and cartography. The territory of communes cultivates variety and fertility in place of the bleak monotony of capitalist space. Reading the Invisible Committee’s description of communal geography, we may appropriate the Zapatista slogan and call for “a world in which many geographies fit”:

Every declared commune calls a new geography into existence around it, and sometimes even at a distance from it. Where there had only been a uniform territory, a plain where everything was interchangeable, in the greyness of generalized equivalence, it raises up a chain of mountains, a whole variegated relief with passes, peaks, incredible pathways between friendly things, and forbidding precipitous terrain between enemy things. Nothing is simple anymore, or is simple in a different way. Every commune creates a political territory that extends out and ramifies as it grows. (12)

Communes thus call into being new communist geographies that are defined by a variety of collective forms of life. Vasudevan calls alternative spaces of everyday life “an expanded counter-geography through which alternative support networks were created, friendships made, and solidarities secured.”(13) Communes thus form new geographies of possibility and non-capitalist relationality.

Commune inhabitants experiment with new collective spatial practices. Squatting enables practices of creative architecture and self-determination of living space that facilitates new forms of life. As Vasudevan explains, occupying dilapidated buildings “offered the potential for squatters to cultivate new forms of sociality and, in so doing, reconcile a ruinous artefact of urban modernity with alternative expressions of human collectivity. . . . Squatters responded to normative assumptions about living and the ‘home’ through the questioning of its more basic spatialities.”(14) For instance, squatters re-engineered buildings to produce enlarged communal space:

[W]alls were removed in order to increase the size of social spaces while stairwells were created to produce a new geography of movement through the building, now connected and held together by an interspatial network of doors, passageways, courtyards, and vestibules. These experiments with the built form became a key process for exploring a new micro-politics of alignment, interdependency, and connection.(15)

The spatial construction of communal life offers a chance to practice new forms of relationships with each other in an everyday communism of equality, autonomy, and democracy. Thus, “it is the very performance of architecture itself that has become, in this context, a key source of inspiration for a whole host of self-organized and collective everyday practices.”(16) This collective performance transforms its participants. Collectively building radical spaces produces what we may call a new, autonomous form of life.

Beyond architectural transformation, the internal world of squatted communes is organized to facilitate the construction of alternative modes of being. Life itself is structured differently within a commune: the very fact of group living forces previously atomized humans into contact with each other in daily life. As an open letter from the Berlin squatters council puts it, “when we occupied [buildings], it was not only for preserving living space. But we also wanted to live and work together again. We want to put a stop to the process of isolation and destruction of collective living. Who in this city is not aware of the torturing loneliness and emptiness of everyday life?”(17)

Communes often organize themselves around collective spaces. Most important, many squatters argue, is the kitchen, which operates “as the key ‘socio-spatial centre of the house.”(18) Collectively running a kitchen makes several political interventions. First, it combats the gendered division of labor that relies on women to cook for men. Second, it connects food with community: collective meals establish a connection between people, as well as with the food they eat. Finally, “outside” political life is enhanced. As one squatter puts it, “[P]olitics assumes an entirely different relation to everyday life when last night’s meetings are discussed over breakfast. Not only is the movement’s progress accelerated, but truly important issues, ones which are lost in the shuffle when we live in isolation, are topics of immediate concern and action.”(19) Collective kitchens are but one example of radical uses of space.

Perhaps even more important for the Autonomen was the function of the squatted commune as a space of cultural production. Subculture, not work, was the driving force of everyday life. As a document of autonomous theses stresses, “we have not found one another at the workplace. Engaging in wage labor is an exception for us. We have found one another through punk, the ‘scene,’ and the subculture we move in.”(20) Squats provided space for cultural activity controlled by the movement. In the KuKuCK squat, for instance, “fifty people lived in a complex that included three stages, performance areas for ten theater groups, practice rooms for five bands, a studio, a café, and an auto repair shop.”(21) Squats were also covered in beautiful art that hinted at the fertility inside. Finally, the Autonomen produced collective identity in the streets. Marching in black bloc produces a sense of exhilarating comradery between accomplices and gives a shared identity to the movement: “[T]he black leather jackets worn by many people at demonstrations and the black flags carried by others signaled less an ideological anarchism than a style of dress and behavior—symbols of a way of life that made contempt for the established institutions and their U.S. ‘protectors’ into a virtue. . . . Black became the color of the political void—of the withdrawal of allegiance to parties, governments, and nations.”(22) Writing in a similar context, anarchist anthropologist David Graeber stresses the connection between punk and street actions in his ethnography of the North American anarchist scene. He quotes an activist who explains that

[i]n a mosh pit at a punk or hardcore show, all the kids are going nuts, all together, stage diving, circle pits, crowd surfing, asshole bouncers twice your size, so you develop a feel for space, for fluid motion and action. Linking arms to force a wedge through police lines at an action is just like forcing your way to the front of a crowd at a show with slow steady pressure. It’s not that all Black Bloc’ers are punk rockers, or vice versa, but when the Black Bloc’er leapt over the heads of riot police at the navy memorial during George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001 to escape arrest, he was just stage diving and body surfing.(23)

 

3. Living Communism

“The real communist question is not ‘how to produce,’ but ‘how to live.’”

– The Invisible Committee, Now (154)

 

Autonomists act on the desire to experience communism today, in our everyday lives, even within the bleak world of capitalism. Rather than naive nostalgia for the world we have lost, the Invisible Committee invites us to embrace fragmentation and fight where we stand: “One can deplore [fragmentation] and try to swim back up the river of time, but one can also begin from there and see how to proceed.”(24) Fragmentation brings numerous problems of which we are all too aware, including atomization, alienation, and isolation. But it also brings new possibilities, for “with the endless fragmentation of the world there is a vertiginous increase in the qualitative enrichment of life, and a profusion of forms—for someone who thinks about the promise of communism it contains.”(25) Fragmentation leads to the possibility of the good life within the fragments of the world that we come to inhabit and control. Indeed, “in the fragmentation there is something that points toward what we call ‘communism.’”(26) In a fragmented world, bringing people and places into contact becomes ever more crucial. As the Invisible Committee puts it, “[T]he thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.”(27) Ultimately, this means living communism now, in our practices, gestures, and relationships.

Challenging traditional Marxist and anarchist conceptions of communism that focus solely on seizing the means of production, the Invisible Committee highlights a communism of everyday life. For them, communism does not exist someday in the future; it is not just an ideal to struggle towards but is instead something to live and practice. Indeed, “it’s not a question of fighting for communism. What matters is the communism that is lived in the fight itself.”(28) This is not an anarchistic prefigurative politics that models the world in which we hope to someday live; instead, we must live communism now, in today’s conditions and struggles. Communism is to be practiced in each of our actions and relations. “Communism does not hinge on self-renunciation but on the attention given to the smallest action. It’s a question of our plane of perception and hence of our way of doing things. A practical matter.”(29) It is an affirmative response to the horrors of life under capitalism. This is why “we need to give the same care to the smallest everyday details of our shared life as we give to the revolution,” and “the first duty of revolutionaries is to take care of the worlds they constitute.”(30) Communism is a question of the everyday practices of healthy community, not solely of the organization of production. The goal of communism is not just socialization of the means of production or the “superior economic organization of society,” but rather “it is the great health of forms of life. This great health is obtained through a patient re-articulation of the disjoined members of our being, in touch with life.”(31)

We should be clear, however, that possessing the means to produce non-commodified goods—and life itself—is crucial to living communism. The Invisible Committee is perhaps too eager to distance themselves from the traditional Left, so they underemphasize the importance of the means of production. They do, however, recognize the importance of controlling the production of our own means of life. In their discussion of blockading infrastructure, they concede that “a blockade is only as effective as the insurgents’ capacity to supply themselves and to communicate, as effective as the self-organization of the different communes. How will we feed ourselves once everything is paralyzed? . . . Acquiring the skills to provide, over time, for one’s own basic subsistence implies appropriating the necessary means of its production.”(32) But the Invisible Committee encourages establishing our own means of production rather than expropriating those of capitalism. For the problem is that

capital has taken hold of every detail and every dimension of existence… In doing so, it has reduced to very little the share of things in this world that one might want to reappropriate. Who would wish to reappropriate nuclear power plants, Amazon’s warehouses, the expressways, ad agencies, high-speed trains, Dassault, La Defense business complex, auditing firms, nanotechnologies, supermarkets and their poisonous merchandise? . . . No one with any sense. (33)

While the Invisible Committee perhaps overstates it, this line of reasoning is compelling. What might it look like to establish our own infrastructure as the basis of constructing alternative worlds?

 

4. Alternative Infrastructure

“A revolutionary movement is not just a result of ‘objective conditions’: it is the result of the structures we are able to build.”

– Arbeitskreis Politische Okonomie, quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames (89–90)

 

The Invisible Committee locates contemporary power in infrastructure. Power resides in the material functioning of the world, the networks of just-in-time production, and the unending flows of commodities, people, and ideas. Thus, “in the era of networks, governing means ensuring the interconnection of people, objects, and machines as well as the free—i.e., transparent and controllable—circulation of information that is generated in this manner.”(34) The consequences of this are far ranging, but two implications are particularly relevant here. First, power’s location within infrastructure makes it vulnerable to attack. Sabotage, blockage of infrastructural projects and disruption of flows immediately limits power’s ability to manage the world.(35) Second, our ability to construct counter-infrastructure of our own takes on new importance. Alternative infrastructure takes many forms, from collective houses and squats to community gardens, women’s health clinics, and free schools.(36) Construction of alternative infrastructure becomes itself an affirmative attack on capitalist power—or, as the Invisible Committee prefers, a destitution of power—and provides the base for sabotage and other assaults. But perhaps most importantly, alternative infrastructure provides the space in which it is possible to live communism. It establishes the conditions within which we may live differently, relate to each other in new ways, and fully inhabit our lives in connection with the earth. Yet both the Autonomen and the Invisible Committee have a fraught relationship with alternative institutions and infrastructure. They are to be used and exploited for revolutionary purposes but also critiqued and radicalized.

The Autonomen were based in the alternative movement’s infrastructure as well as networks of squatted buildings that they directly controlled. Throughout the 1970s, networks of radical spaces were established to support the movement. As one Autonomen member known by the pen name Geronimo explains, “in the beginning, many of the alternative projects saw themselves as everyday support structures for the general political struggle: left-wing bookstores, bars, cafes, print shops, etc.”(37) Alternative activists believed in the “strong ‘utopian’ element: all of these projects should provide tangible examples of a future socialist society established in the midst of capitalism. In this sense, the beginning of the alternative movement was strongly connected to the autonomous impulse of rejecting wage labor and resistance in everyday life.”(38) This developed into the central strategic commitment to squatting. As a group called Proletarian Front put it, “to squat means to destroy the capitalist plot for our neighborhoods. It means to refuse rent and the capitalist shoe box structure. It means to build communes and community centers. It means to recognize the social potential of each neighborhood. It means to overcome helplessness. In squatting and in rent strikes we can find the pivotal point of anticapitalist struggles outside of the factory.”(39) Alternative infrastructure thus provided a new world for its inhabitants—one based in solidarity, self-determination, and equality. It was seen by many activists as both communism in action and as the foundation upon which anti-capitalist struggle was based.

However, the alternative movement began to emphasize the importance of alternative infrastructure for its own sake, especially as the West German working class largely continued to accept the payoffs of social democracy rather than revolt. The Autonomen were clear that although they “use the alternative movement’s infrastructure . . . our ideas are very different from those of the alternative movement. . . . We are aware that capitalism is using the alternative scene to create a new cycle of capital and labor, both by providing employment for unemployed youth and as a testing field for solving economic problems and pacifying social tensions.”(40) As time went on, alternative institutions were progressively pacified and integrated into the capitalist economy. The Invisible Committee is also critical of the alternative or “solidarity” economy. They write in 2014, soon after the movements of the squares (the Spanish indignados, Greek anti-austerity protests, and Occupy Wall Street in the US), of a recent proliferation of networks of cooperatives that respond—inadequately—to a desire to escape the capitalist order of the world and the alienation of wage labor.(41)

At their best, cooperatives support social movements by providing a concrete alternative to traditional capitalist economic organization. Yet cooperatives as such pose no threat to capitalism, and indeed the most successful of them often become like any other capitalist business. Instead of thinking in terms of economic production for the market, we should approach the alternative economy in terms of needs, use, and complicity. The commune, the Invisible Committee says, “seeks to dissolve the question of needs. It seeks to break all economic dependence and all political subjugation. . . . The commune addresses needs with a view to annihilating the being of need within us.”(42) The correct orientation towards cooperatives is thus to use their equipment, host meetings in their spaces, commandeer production to fulfill the needs of the movement, and so on. In any case, “the fact remains that we must organize ourselves, organize on the basis of what we love to do, and provide ourselves the means to do it.”(43) Communes can also connect the networks of the solidarity economy and push them to replace power’s control of infrastructure.

The commune coordinates networks of cooperatives in order to build our capacity to exist autonomously. It “is what brings all the economic communities into communication with each other, what runs through and overflows them; it is the link that thwarts their self-centering tendency.”(44) The creation of new institutions is meant to suppress the institutions of capitalist state power: “Withdrawing from the institutions is anything but leaving a void, it’s suppressing them in a positive way. To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution, but to attack the need we have of it.”(45) Used correctly, alternative institutions become weapons of destitution and replace our dependence on established power with an organic dependence on each other. Liberated territory proliferates via movement of people, ideas, and things between communes.

 

5. Secession, Attack, and Insurrection

“Escape, but while escaping look for a weapon.”

– Gilles Deleuze, quoted in The Invisible Committee, Now (80)

 

Rather than orienting towards seizing and wielding power, networks of communes attempt to secede from power’s grasp and destitute its institutions. Secession does not mean establishing new borders but instead practicing communist forms of life and promoting counter-circulation between a growing archipelago of autonomous territories.

Seceding means inhabiting a territory, assuming our situated configuration of the world, our way of dwelling there, the form of life and the truths that sustain us, and from there entering into conflict or complicity. So it means linking up strategically with other zones of dissidence, intensifying our circulations with friendly regions, regardless of borders. To secede is. . .  to trace out a different, discontinuous geography, an intensive one, in the form of an archipelago.(46)

This is how communism is built on a large scale. Territory is inhabited and controlled, the people living within this archipelago of liberated territory establish contact and material links between themselves, learn to provide for their needs, and establish liberated relationships with each other and the land. The means of existence are appropriated and/or collectively constructed. Organic gardens and farms are established to directly feed people, free clinics to heal the sick, and worker cooperatives to produce for the needs of the community rather than profit. The material construction of another world deprives capitalist state power of its capacity to manage and control us. This is ultimately what the Invisible Committee means by destitution, by “becoming ungovernable.”(47) Secession happens not just in isolated rural communes, but in the hearts of cities, in small college towns, and in the connections between communes everywhere.

Dominant power knows its vulnerability, however, and communes cannot secede without a fight. The struggle against capitalist state power is based in the communal territories. Communes are not only centers of alternative life but also bases of liberated territory from which to attack the state and capitalism. Attack is an affirmative component of revolutionary life. As one autonomous activist puts it, “[W]herever people begin to sabotage the political, moral, and technical structures of domination, an important step toward a self-determined life has been made.”(48) Destitution attacks and suppresses capitalist state power while constructing a new world. The Invisible Committee frames it like this:

[T]he revolutionary gesture no longer consists in a simple violent appropriation of this world; it divides into two. On the one hand, there are worlds to be made, forms of life made to grow apart from what reigns, including by salvaging what can be salvaged from the present state of things, and on the other, there is the imperative to attack, to simply destroy the world of capital. . . it’s clear that the worlds one constructs can maintain their apartness from capital only together with the fact of attacking it and conspiring against it. . . . Only an affirmation has the potential for accomplishing the work of destruction. The destituent gesture is thus desertion and attack, creation and wrecking, and all at once, in the same gesture.(49)

We must connect destruction with creation, attack the world of capitalist state power as we build our own, and defend ourselves while escaping from capital. This is the work of destitution.

As power resides in and works through infrastructure, sabotaging or otherwise attacking infrastructure becomes central to revolutionary political practice. Given the development of post-Fordist just-in-time production, blocking infrastructure and circulation has become an even more potent weapon against the capitalist system. Chokepoints can be targeted by relatively small groups of people whose force can be greatly multiplied. Charmaine Chua, a theorist of circulation and logistics, argues that disruptions and blockades of supply chains serve a dual purpose: not only do they disrupt capitalist circulation/production, but “we might also envision such episodes of disruption . . . as an ethics that reproduces other possibilities for communization and community where capitalist accumulation has left so many excluded.”(50) Alongside sabotage of already-existing circulation, the blockade of new infrastructural projects combines sabotage with the construction of alternative worlds. Blockades were one of the primary weapons of autonomous groups. In West Germany, the struggle against nuclear power plants helped constitute the Autonomen. In what activists called the “Free Republic of Wendland,” which was established in 1980 to block a nuclear dump site in Gorleben, George Katsiaficas says that “we became human beings in some essential meaning of the term, sharing food and living outside the system of monetary exchange. An erotic dimension was created that simply could not be found in normal interaction. Wendlanders lived together not only to build a confrontation but also to create a space for autonomous self-government through political discussion.”(51) In this way, each attack is simultaneously the creation of a new world, and vice versa.

Establishing a new world while destroying the old is ultimately a question of insurrection. This will not necessarily take the form of the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace, nor an extended riot measured by the number of molotovs thrown and streets liberated from police. As the Invisible Committee says in The Coming Insurrection, “[A]n insurrectional surge may be nothing more than a multiplication of communes, their coming into contact and forming of ties.”(52) Liberation comes through political victories and control of space, not just through armed confrontation. “Liberate territory from police occupation. . . . Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use unnecessary. Against the army, the only victory is political. . . . When power is in the gutter, it’s enough to walk over it.”(53) After the more recent experiences of failed insurrections, the Invisible Committee is more cautious, warning of the growing appeal of fascism. Thus, they conclude To Our Friends: “Thinking, attacking, building—such is our fabulous agenda. This text is the beginning of a plan. See you soon.”(54)

Conclusion

The Autonomen were unable to transcend subcultural marginality in order to build beyond a certain level. From a brief high point in the 1980s, when it appeared that the autonomous movements had the potential to develop into a truly revolutionary force that could challenge the reign of the state and capitalism, they rapidly disintegrated in the 1990s. The reasons are numerous, including the world-changing collapse of the Soviet Union, but perhaps foremost is that the Autonomen were never able to truly build lasting counter-power or launch a sustained offensive against capitalist state power. Of course, one could take a more classical Marxist stance and say that they failed because of their lack of a working-class base. There is truth in this, but it is useful to evaluate them on their own terms as well. Though they could win individual battles with the police, defending squats took up an enormous amount of energy and resources. Most fell victim to the state’s carrot-and-stick strategy that offered favorable leases to squats that agreed to legal regularization and attacked those that resisted with unrelenting force. The Autonomen were never able to move beyond a strategic equilibrium into meaningful secession and destitution of power. Indeed, defending a squat from the police or rioting in the street does not destitute the power of the police as a state institution. What, then, would it take to overcome such forms of state power?

The Invisible Committee is motivated in large part by a desire to understand the failure of autonomous movements and correct their mistakes. Thus, they focus not only on living communism but also thinking seriously about the contemporary nature and form of power and how to attack and neutralize it. Their answer lies in blockage, secession, and destitution. In the wake of the 2011–12 movements of the squares, many recent irruptions have taken these forms, from the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD (Zone to Defend: an autonomous zone that successful blocked construction of an airport in France, one of a dozen ZADs across the country)(55) to the Olympia railroad blockade(56) and Occupy ICE actions across the United States over the years. After their latest book, the Invisible Committee have largely remained silent, choosing instead to immerse themselves in political work on the ground within the ZADs. New innovations, as always, will come from struggle itself.

 

Spencer Beswick (he/him) is a PhD Candidate at Cornell University researching the history of anarchism and the left; his dissertation, “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century,” explores the transformation and revitalization of the anarchist movement in the 1980s-90s. He is one of the organizers of the Anarchist Oral History Project. Spencer has been active with a number of radical projects since his life was transformed by Occupy Boston in 2011, including labor organizing, Food Not Bombs, Ithaca’s Antidote Infoshop, and DSA.

 

Notes

  1. The Invisible Committee, Now, (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2017), 80. For a helpful introduction to destituent power by Agamben, see “What is a Destituent Power?” (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2014, 32) 65-74. In her translator’s introduction, Stephanie Wakefield summarizes the concept of destituent power: “In contrast to attempts to affirm a constituent power independent of a relation to constituted power, which for Agamben both reproduce the governmental structure of the exception and represent the apex of metaphysics, destituent power outlines a force that, in its very constitution, deactivates the governmental machine. For Agamben, it is in the sensible elaboration of the belonging together of life and form, being and action, beyond all relation, that the impasse of the present will be overcome. Ultimately, Agamben points not only towards what it means to become Ungovernable, but towards the potential of staying so.”
  2. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2014), 199-200. (Emphasis in original).
  3. Alexander Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin, (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 15.
  4. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 208.
  5. Quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomous Movement, (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 115.
  6. George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 195.
  7. “We do not fight for ideology, or for the proletariat, or for ‘the people.’ We fight for a self-determined life in all aspects of our existence, knowing that we can only be free if all are free.” “Autonomous Theses 1981,” quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 173.
  8. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 201.
  9. The Invisible Committee, Now, 26.
  10. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 202.
  11. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007, 2009), 108.
  12. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 229.
  13. Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the City: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin, 1968-2012.” In The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present, edited by Bart Van Der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert Van Hoogenhuijze, 131-151. (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 136.
  14. Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the City,” 141.
  15. Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the City,” 141.
  16. Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the City,” 149.
  17. Quoted in George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 95.
  18. Alexander Vasudevan, “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the City,” 149.
  19. Quoted in George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 175.
  20. “Autonomous Theses 1981,” Fire and Flames, 174.
  21. George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 95.
  22. George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 90.
  23. David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography, (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), 419.
  24. The Invisible Committee, Now, 40.
  25. The Invisible Committee, Now, 44.
  26. The Invisible Committee, Now, 45.
  27. The Invisible Committee, Now, 49.
  28. The Invisible Committee, Now, 80.
  29. The Invisible Committee, Now, 143.
  30. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 164, 194.
  31. The Invisible Committee, Now, 137, 143.
  32. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 125.
  33. The Invisible Committee, Now, 85.
  34. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 104. Or as they put it earlier, “[P]ower now resides in the infrastructures of this world. Contemporary power is of an architectural and impersonal, and not a representative or personal nature.” Hence, “government is no longer in the government. … Power, henceforth, is the very order of things, and the police charged with defending it. … [G]overnment … arranges life through its instruments and its layouts.” The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 83, 85-86.
  35. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 111, 125.
  36. George Katsiaficas describes the alternative movement as “a collection of self-managed institutions built up to serve the everyday needs of the movement. Bookstores, bars, free schools, ecology centers, food stores, cooperative living groups … and day-care centers.” The Kreuzberg neighborhood in West Berlin was the epicenter of the movement. The Subversion of Politics, 102.
  37. Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 61.
  38. Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 61.
  39. Quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 53.
  40. “Autonomous Theses 1981,” Fire and Flames, 174.
  41. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 209.
  42. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 102; The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 214-15.
  43. The Invisible Committee, Now, 110-111.
  44. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 210.
  45. The Invisible Committee, Now, 80.
  46. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 184-85.
  47. The Invisible Committee, Now, 81.
  48. Quoted in Geronimo, Fire and Flames, 115.
  49. The Invisible Committee, Now, 86-88.
  50. Charmaine Chua, “Logistics, Capitalist Circulation, Chokepoints,” The Disorder of Things, 9 September 2014. https://thedisorderofthings.com/2014/09/09/logistics-capitalist-circulation-chokepoints/
  51. George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 84.
  52. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 117.
  53. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 127-28.
  54. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 239.
  55. See for instance the “Zad Forever” blog which is the central English-language source of information https://zadforever.blog/
  56. Anonymous Contributor, “Commune Against Civilization: Dispatches from Olympia Blockade,” It’s Going Down. 20 November 2017. https://itsgoingdown.org/commune-civilization-dispatches-olympia-blockade/

 

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. “What is a Destituent Power?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 65-74.

Anonymous Contributor. “Commune Against Civilization: Dispatches from Olympia Blockade.” It’s Going Down. 20 November 2017. https://itsgoingdown.org/commune-civilization-dispatches-olympia-blockade/

“Autonomous Theses 1981.” In Geronimo, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomous Movement. Oakland: PM Press, 2012.

Chua, Charmaine. “Logistics, Capitalist Circulation, Chokepoints.” The Disorder of Things. 9 September 2014. https://thedisorderofthings.com/2014/09/09/logistics-capitalist-circulation-chokepoints/

Geronimo. Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomous Movement. Oakland: PM Press, 2012.

Graeber, David. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland: AK Press, 2009.

The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007, 2009.

———. Now. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2017.

———. To Our Friends. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2014.

Katsiaficas, George. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. Oakland: AK Press, 2006.

Vasudevan, Alexander. “Autonomous Urbanisms and the Right to the City: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin, 1968-2012.” In The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present, edited by Bart Van Der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert Van Hoogenhuijze, 131-151. Oakland: PM Press, 2014.

———. Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

Free tickets available here!

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.

 

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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.

 

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“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.”2 It 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.3 When 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, and more 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

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds 

 

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. 

(art by Amanda Priebe )

 

This essay is from the Imaginations issue of Perspectives (n.31) and is available from Powell’s Books here! and AK Press here!

 

Notes

  1. Aamer Rahman, “Is it really OK to punch Nazis?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKICKcMU3MU
  2. 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. 
  3. “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/#!
  4. 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/
  5. “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/#!
  6. “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
  7. Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 50.
  8. 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.”
  9. Emily Gorcenski, Documenting Hate: Charlottesville. Frontlines, PBS Propublica Documentary, August 7, 2018.
  10. 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/
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. brown, 22.
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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

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