Anarchists and other radicals face a chronic dilemma when it comes to deciding who to align ourselves with in the course of a particular struggle. We have seen over and over again how much more susceptible we are to being utterly crushed by state repression when we’re taking up uncompromising action against the state and are isolated from popular support. We’ve also seen again and again that when we try to team up with various leftists and non-profit organizations with less radical goals, it ends up empowering those organizations to control and recuperate, for very different ends, what were once ungovernable struggles.
This historical problem is one of many that the authors of “The Forest in the City: Two Years of Forest Defense in Atlanta, Georgia,” published in February, shrug aside in favor of a compromised approach that they offer as though it were a self-evident movement strategy. While we appreciate the detailed information and reflections in the piece about this extremely important ongoing campaign, we are also concerned by the ostensibly objective stance taken by the authors. The article seems to take for granted that their conclusions will be shared by all radicals and, in the worst case scenario, could set the stage for discrediting those who might disagree with them from a more radical perspective. Since some of these conclusions seemed somewhat antithetical to us as anarchists, we offer here some thoughts and critiques in the interest of clarifying some alternative strategies that the article overlooks.
Taking for granted that the best approach for a campaign involves quantitatively amassing more people and building popular support, one of the essay’s major claims is that talking to mainstream media is productive and necessary in order to pursue that strategy. At some point, the authors go as far as to argue: “Because corporate media coverage is the primary means by which the authorities prepare popular opinion to accept the repression of protesters and poor people, it can be dangerous not to intervene in it.”
According to their own self-evaluation in this piece, it seems like the activists engaging the media for the Defend The Forest campaign have succeeded in not having their intended messaging censored by the news outlets they’ve engaged with. This is a rare accomplishment for radicals. But what kind of messaging are we talking about here? The authors do not specify, aside from mentioning advocating for radical social change, a phrase that could mean a number of different things. While undoubtedly many relatively uncontroversial talking points about the importance of conserving forest and stopping further police brutality could be safely adopted by mainstream news outlets, it remains highly unlikely that mainstream media would ever approvingly repeat or express the core values behind most anarchists’ participation in the struggle to defend the forest. These values are unavoidably hostile to power, and therefore to the media that power funds.
Engaging with the press inevitably waters down anarchists’ ideas, whether we intend to or not, and obscures our larger goals, which extend far beyond our opposition to this particular police facility. As is often the case, it’s the more conservative commentators who accidentally speak relatively accurately to our animosity towards the entire system – as the chief of the Atlanta Police Department commented after the most recent week of action, “This wasn’t about a public safety training center. This was about anarchy.”
If we care about building autonomy as a core aspect of the destruction of the state and capital, why not build autonomy from the state and capital’s media as well? If our goal is simply to stop Cop City, perhaps dialoging with power and the communication products it offers us will help accomplish this. But it contributes nothing to longer-term radical struggle to participate in the modes of relating and informing provided by the corporate, statist Spectacle rather than developing our own. And while participants in the Atlanta struggle have done both, it is still preferable to focus on the latter. As is generally understood with regard to many of our other enemies, such as fascists, to engage in dialogue is to legitimate the opponent’s standpoint. Why should the media lackeys of the state be an exception to this? Is it possible that those who are so keen to be liked by corporate media are a little too interested in power?
If we really believe in our hopes and dreams for the world, let’s have the courage to defend them. After all, we’re the only ones who are able and willing to do so. But this is also not the core of our struggle against the state. As Josep Gardeneyes wrote in “A Wager on the Future” back in 2015, “Up against a prison society, anarchism will not be spread with better or more propaganda. It will spread if it can exercise force against the dominant structures, if it can put in practice — at least in a limited way — its ideas, and if these ideas are applicable to people’s daily lives.”
Elsewhere, “The Forest in the City” addresses the issue of difference and internal critique:
“Clarity about differences is important, but drawn-out conflicts between rival camps almost always benefit the authorities most of all. The more divisions in a movement, the more emboldened the authorities will be to target the most effective currents within it; when rivals post on social media about each other’s errors or vulnerabilities, this can assist the authorities in strategizing or building a narrative to justify repression. Often such conflicts needlessly polarize entire movements, as everyone is compelled to take sides.”
This is all well and good, but we can observe that there is no discussion in here of any of the differences that we actually should not tolerate. This is undoubtedly because this is a difficult question with no simple answers, and the authors are speaking here of ideological differences in particular. But if an ideology is itself authoritarian, is it going to be called divisive if as anti-authoritarians we try to separate ourselves from it? What about taking a stance on sexual assault, racism, or other instances of interpersonal harm that happen within our circles? It feels dangerous to approach conflict in such a way in which any stance on a matter of internal hierarchy or oppression within our struggles will be primarily received as damaging to our movements and beneficial to the federal government.
Those of us who operate in relative isolation from the Left and NGOs haven’t chosen to do that because it benefits us or is easier or more fun (although we personally think that it is more fun). It’s because individuals and organizations from those tendencies have consistently shown they do not share anarchist goals (this should already be obvious from the self-description of many of these organizations), do work that is often in fact counterproductive to our goals, and in the worst of cases occasionally threaten us with repression.
For example, Greenpeace might help with a particular aspect of an ecological struggle like the Atlanta forest defense, but it does not share many of our values and visions for the world. Additionally, legal frameworks are not going to fulfill our broader goals — they might help deter a particular project, but to call them an “offensive front” (as the article does) confuses what we’re all against. It’s certainly not wrong to file lawsuits or adopt other legal means to stop something especially bad from happening, but how can people using the acceptable legal channels offered by the state be part of a war against the state? What is it that we’re at war against then? The language of this article, while often militant, is somehow also so slippery and vague that it’s not really dear what we’re about or against.
When we tell the story of our struggles in this way — to include people working very much within the system – it might build popular support and reduce our isolation, but it also leaves a door open for dependence on the state and legal solutions to our problems, which are in fact problems that necessitate a total departure from the state. In a recent interview for this article with a companion who participated in the occupation at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016-2017, they warned specifically of the dangers of negotiating or building trust in any part of the state: “One effect of [President Obama’s announcement that delayed the pipeline’s construction] was that it made some folks more willing to negotiate with the state. The [state’s] tactic had given the impression, to some people, that there were actually some ‘good guys’ in the gov trying to work with and for us. This in turn led some people to feel the need to ‘help them help us’ and the folks who took that bait started negotiating in seemingly small ways that eventually led to the slow raids and demise of our camps.”
There is simply no good answer right now to the question of principled isolation vs. compromised popularity. There’s no use pretending that any of us have one. In the meantime, we don’t think that anarchists who have evaluated the options and decided that compromise isn’t the most effective one should be called dangerous to the movement.
This is an article from volume 9, issue 1 of Anathema: A Philadelphia Anarchist Periodical.