The following was written by an anarchist not in Atlanta who has been follwing Stop Cop City closely, but not contributing much. Take it for what it’s worth.
Despite the (lack of) final result, the organizers of the Block Cop City demo did do a few things right. Their celebrated 80-something city speaking tour was straight out of the old summit hopping playbook, and did a lot to raise awareness of the mobilization. And despite rumors to the contrary, BCC had a robust legal support structure in place, although it didn’t end up having much to do. BCC’s voluminous rhetoric even convinced the cops to halt construction at the site for a day, although they might not have bothered if they’d known how harmless the action would be. That’s about it, though. After months of planning, organizing, and speaking appearances, a few hundred people marched toward the Cop City construction site, were met by a massive wall of cops, made a brief but valiant attempt to push their way through, were repelled, and called it a day. If it weren’t for a few unannounced and spontaneously organized acts of resistance, the entire week would have been a complete bust.
Starting with tactics, it’s obvious from videos of the march that somebody anticipated some potential difficulty in getting to the construction site. Two reinforced banners were prominently placed at the front, followed by a cluster of umbrellas, equipment that would hardly have been necessary if marchers thought they could just stroll on to the site and immediately lock themselves to something. The banners worked pretty well, for all the good that did. As the march approached the riot line, the banner-holders formed a wedge and and unhesitatingly charged the cops, backed by the full weight of the marchers behind them. This avoided the classic mistake of rearward marchers hanging back and expecting the front line to do all the work against cops twice their size. The riot cops held their ground for a few seconds, shoulders pressed against the banners, but were shoved back. For a moment it looked like the march was breaking through, but then a tear gas grenade went off in the middle.
An opportunity was wasted here. The cops weren’t prepared for their own gas and retreated hastily to pull on masks – but the march, inexplicably, wasn’t prepared for it either. Instead of advancing triumphantly through the haze, masks firmly affixed to every face, the march froze, with marchers retreating back down the road or dispersing into the woods on either side. Why, if they knew they would need reinforced banners, didn’t BCC organizers also hand out respirators, and even splurge on a couple leaf blowers? Maybe they blew the rest of their budget on the giant puppets? Regardless, even an N95 mask and a pair of shop class goggles for every participant would have let the march advance another few yards, and put it in a better position to resist whatever else the cops had in store. They still wouldn’t have gotten much further, especially since they had no reinforced banners on the sides of the march, but the oversight still seems odd.
We shouldn’t focus on tactics to the detriment of strategy, however. That march’s worst problem wasn’t a lack of PPE, it was that the cops had known it was coming for weeks. After the debacle in March, the last thing the Georgia State Patrol was going to do was allow themselves to be put in a position where they might have to close a gate. When the enemy knows what you want to do, misdirection is essential, but BCC organizers refused to do any. It wasn’t for lack of options. They could have pulled the classic heist movie trick of going a day early – calling the demo for Tuesday and instead invading the construction site on Monday. They could have chosen a different target while all the cops were concentrated near the forest. Maybe the Atlanta Journal-Constitution building? They could at least have attempted to infiltrate lockdown teams on to the site from the back while the march distracted the cops.
Better yet, the organizers could have simply called for a convergence, arranged for logistical support such as food, medics, and housing, and invited other organizations to pull together actions. This is the model employed at the 2008 RNC protests in St. Paul, MN, one that centers a diversity of tactics and gave us the St. Paul Principles. By all accounts diversity of tactics was never an option for BCC’s organizing cabal. Multiple reportbacks from the speaking tour, public and otherwise, emphasized that BCC would countenance no deviation from The Way of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience, and anybody who didn’t like it could just stay home. (I don’t know how many people took this option who might otherwise have traveled to Atlanta.) Note that the RNC Welcoming Committee in St. Paul also developed an elaborate action strategy, but did not insist that every anarchist who showed up follow their plan. Their flexibility was rewarded when a cluster of anarchists came prepared to march instead of set up the blockades that the cops had been preparing for for months. BCC displayed no similar tolerance for experimentation. A BCC spokesperson did extoll diversity of tactics in a podcast interview with IGD, but the phrase appears nowhere on the group’s web site. An allegedly Frequently Asked Question on the site is “What About Other Protest Tactics?”, the answer to which is basically a disclaimer that BCC does not in principle object to other kinds of tactics. There’s a difference however, between actively promoting an idea and simply declining to oppose it. Certainly the organization never proposed anything like the St. Paul Principles.
Despite all BCC’s peripatetic preemptive protest policing, nonviolent civil disobedience is not what they got. While the final result would have been no different, that doomed banner charge had to have been at least slightly less disempowering than the NVCD equivalent of sitting down in the middle of the road and linking arms. Later that evening, a noise demo at Dekalb County Jail in support of the handful of arrestees also took a decidedly not-nonviolent turn, with prisoners smashing out their cell windows (oh, the humanity!) and lowering DIY ropes to receive bags of forbidden snacks from the demonstrators below. Better yet, sometime in the night some people who definitely hadn’t gotten the nonviolence message snuck into a facility owned by Ernst Concrete, Cop City’s foundation contractor, and torched seven cement mixers. Replacing those trucks will very likely eliminate any profit Ernst stood to make on the project, sending an unmistakeable message to future contractors about the dangers of working on Cop City.
But of course it doesn’t take hundreds of out-of-towners with a marching band and giant puppets to burn construction machinery and hold noise demos. Locals could have done that just fine on their own. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that everybody who went to Atlanta for BCC would have been better off staying home and raising money for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.
Submitted Anonymously Over Email