“While standpoints such as deep ecology, social ecology, ecofeminism, animal liberation, Black liberation, and the ELF are all important, none can accomplish systemic social transformation by itself. Working together, however, through a diversity of critiques and tactics that mobilize different communities, a flank of militant groups and positions can drive a battering ram into the structures of power and domination and open the door to a new future.”
—Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella, II, A Fire in the Belly of the Beast127
“Solidarity is a flame that cannot be extinguished.”
—Greek insurrectionary slogan
WIMMIN’S FIRE BRIGADE
It’s November 1982. In British Columbia, a new chain of pornography stores has been spreading, expanding from one to thirteen stores in only a year. Red Hot Video specializes in violent pornography that eroticizes and glorifies the abuse of women.
Their videos have been widely condemned by women’s groups in British Columbia and across Canada and the United States. These videos are bad enough to be illegal under provincial law. But despite a lobbying campaign by dozens of women’s groups, the government has failed to enforce its own laws.128 The Red Hot Video stores have remained open and profitable.
So a group of women—dubbing themselves the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade—decide to take matters into their own hands. They include Ann Hansen and Julie Belmas, who have spent years in the underground group Direct Action. The women spend weeks planning. And on the night of November 22, they split into three groups and go to three separate Red Hot Video stores.
After checking to make sure that the stores are empty, they smash windows and pour gasoline inside. Then they throw in lit matches. The gasoline ignites immediately—the explosion is bigger than they expected, and flames burst though the smashed windows. Hansen is standing too close to one of the buildings and the flames burn her face. (She gets second-degree burns and loses some hair, but will recover fully.)
One of the stores burns to the ground completely. A second is partially destroyed. The Wimmin’s Fire Brigade issues a communiqué explaining their action: “Although these tapes violate the Criminal Code of Canada and the B.C. guidelines on pornography, all lawful attempts to shut down Red Hot Video have failed because the justice system was created, and is controlled, by rich men to protect their profits and property. As a result, we are left no viable alternative but to change the situation ourselves through illegal means. This is an act of self-defense against hate propaganda!”
Aboveground women’s groups are surprised, but wisely refrain from condemning the arson. The British Columbia Federation of Women issues a statement the next day: “Although we did not participate in the fire bombing of Nov. 22, 1982 . . . we are in sympathy with the anger and frustration of the women who did.”129 The firebombing—and the media and public attention it generates—galvanizes aboveground groups and spawns a whole new campaign.
Pickets of the stores take place province-wide. Some of the women present wear red plastic firefighters’ hats with “Wimmin’s Fire Brigade” written across the front. Many small, local groups form to organize.130 A few months after the firebombing, Hansen and Belmas are arrested as part of different police investigation. (The other women involved in the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade are never caught.) But on the same day as those arrests take place, the RCMP raid the Red Hot Video store in Victoria, and lay charges of distributing obscene material.
Writing later on, Ann Hansen would call the firebombing her most successful militant action: “Within a year of the fire-bombings, the franchise had been whittled down from thirteen stores to only one. Success could also be measured in terms of popular support. In the days following the fire-bombings, radio phone-in shows devoted to the firebombing were inundated with supportive calls. Letters in the editorial sections of the newspaper weighed as heavily in support of the action. . . . The most obvious sign of public support was the large number of women who would show up at demonstrations, wearing red plastic fire hats and claiming to be members of the WFB. After the police raid on the Victoria store on January 20, 1983, the Red Hot Video stores that hadn’t already closed down, or changed their names or moved out of the province, were crippled in legal fees due to the ongoing series of raids by the RCMP.”
She would conclude: “The Wimmin’s Fire Brigade was successful because it acted around an issue that the vast majority of people support, and used tactics with which ordinary people could identify.”
Divide and conquer; the most effective way for a ruler to secure his power is to turn those he rules against each other.
Through the 1960s and ’70s, the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) secretly sought to undermine and divide leftist political groups in the United States. They targeted everyone from moderate civil liberties groups to militants like the Black Panthers. FBI agents did this using a variety of techniques ranging from surveillance and phony letters all the way to targeted assassinations. They didn’t just want to destroy individual people and groups. They wanted to destroy movements. Effective COINTELPRO operations might get the Black Panthers of the East to hate the Black Panthers of the West, or drive a wedge between the American Indian Movement and Puerto Rican independence organizers. The FBI also wanted potential sympathizers in the public to fear these groups and for established liberals to condemn them.
I’ll discuss those schemes, and how to counteract them, in later chapters. But for now, the important thing to remember is this: COINTELPRO worked not only because it was secret, but because it mostly exacerbated tensions and schisms that already existed. COINTELPRO was most effective where solidarity was already weak, where groups were already fragmented, where organizers were already competitive and paranoid. Where resistance movements could be divided along lines of tactics, race, class, and gender.
Any movement that wants to win must be able to counteract these schisms. Not just the fractures created by spies and cops and newscasters, but those even more deep-seated rifts. Those created by oppressions like racism, patriarchy, homophobia, which take a long time and a lot of work and commitment to heal (and which, perhaps, can only be fixed fully through revolution). An effective movement must deal also with the practical conflicts that arise in the course of any campaign over goals, tactics, and strategy.
And so a resistance movement that wants to win must develop a deep and enduring tradition of genuine solidarity. It must develop a shared culture of resistance.
There are many movements in history that have been able to do these things, at least temporarily. Organizations like the Deacons for Defense and the radical labor groups during the Depression were able to build real solidarity among people using different tactics. They combined community organizing and militant direct action. Movements like the 1960s Rainbow Coalition and the Poor People’s Campaign (which I’ll discuss in this chapter) brought allies together from many different backgrounds and ethnicities. Such movements have often been able to uphold solidarity, and they have used what I’m calling full spectrum resistance.
We’ll come back to successful movements like these. But I want to start with a critical direct source of intra-movement conflict: the issue of militant tactics.
THE OVERTON WINDOW AND RADICAL FLANKING
There is a common idea on the liberal left that any resistance action taken must already be supported by the majority, that otherwise it will alienate potential supporters. (This is a major reason that so much of the left has retreated to nonconfrontational lifestyle approaches.) But the historical reality is much different. History is full of movements that have been galvanized and propelled by actions the establishment considered dangerous and even extreme. The Wimmin’s Fire Brigade, the Deacons for Defense, and suffragist Women’s Social and Political Union are three important examples I’ve already touched on; I will discuss many more throughout the course of this book.
Actions on the fringe of acceptability can benefit a movement in many different ways. Militant action makes a moderate position (and the possibility of compromise) much more appealing to those in power, and it makes formerly risky action appear more moderate. This is an old idea that social movements have used for centuries. Indeed, the dynamic between militants and moderates has even been explored in political science as the “Overton Window.”
This concept originated from Joseph Overton, a political analyst at a right-wing think tank. He wanted to understand how new ideas could move from the fringe to the status quo. In his continuum, an idea started off as unthinkable, and then as it became more familiar it became radical, then acceptable, sensible, popular, and eventually policy (fig. 3-1).
Figure 3-1: The Overton Window
Social movements can push ideas along this continuum, either in the popular sphere or the opinion of the political establishment. Take anti-segregation struggles, for example. At the beginning of the 1900s, racial integration was more or less unthinkable for most white people in the United States (fig. 3-2). However, the idea moved from being unthinkable to merely radical through the first half of the century as people fought segregation (and as Black migration into cities and World War II helped put pressure on the system).
Figure 3-2: Changing attitudes toward racial integration in the US
Through the civil rights fights of the late 1950s and early 1960s, integration gained support and sympathy from the general population (especially in the North, of course). And it became a matter of public policy with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
An idea or political position can become more acceptable through propaganda and repetition. Or it can advance through political struggle and conflict.
I have in my hand a copy of a political cartoon from a 1962 issue of the New York Post.131 Two Black men, seemingly of opposing views, are having a pint at the pub and arguing about nonviolence as two white men listen from the next booth. As the Black men get up to leave, the militant of the two remarks: “Your non-violence better work pretty soon, man! A lot of us are getting damn tired.” As soon as they leave, the two wide-eyed white men agree that the United States should integrate immediately, “before those extremists take over!” But outside, the “pacifist” lights a cigarette for his militant friend and congratulates him on a job well done. “There’s another white bar down the block,” remarks the militant. “Let’s go down there and panic them.”
When new, more radical ideas are advocated, they can “bump over” less radical ideas by shifting the entire continuum. If you have an idea that is considered too radical—say, direct defiance of segregation and mass arrests—a perfect way to nudge that over into acceptability is to introduce an even more extreme idea, one that had previously been unthinkable—like armed self-defense (fig. 3-3). When the civil rights struggle started, after all, polite protests were considered dangerously radical by some. The same went for boycotts and lunch-counter sit-ins when first used. (Organizers including Martin Luther King Jr. were attacked, even by liberal supporters of integration, for being “outside agitators” who ought to leave the issue of segregation up to the courts.) But boycotts and sit-ins made regular protest seem even more acceptable and safe.
Figure 3-3: New ideas and tactics in the civil rights struggle
When the Freedom Rides began, they were too radical for MLK—he spent the entire night before the first group departed trying to convince the riders to call it off. But the Freedom Riders did go, and in doing so they nudged over the spectrum. Armed self-defense organizers would also push the nonviolent resisters into acceptability as they became more publicly prominent in the early 1960s.
Far from alienating new members, militant and radical ideas can make participation feel safer and more acceptable to new people (so long as people have the option of participating in the way they choose). Civil rights protest marches had once been a fringe event, but as they were pushed along the spectrum of acceptability they became increasingly popular and well-attended. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (where King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech) was attended by over 300,000 people.
Of course, this illustration is simplified for practical reasons, and many of these changes overlapped rather than happening sequentially. But you get the idea—the introduction of new radical ideas and action is a crucial way for any social movement to move forward.
Radical flanking and the Overton Window informed many radical movements, including Earth First!. Howie Wolke, a founder of Earth First!, explained: “When I helped found Earth First!, I thought that it would be the ‘sacrificial lamb’ of the environmental movement; we would make the Sierra Club look moderate by taking positions that most people would consider ridiculous.”132 As Matthew Walton and Jessica Widy point out, “EF! explicitly stated that although they adopted more radical action in support of their no compromise position, they did not pass judgement on the mainstream groups for working largely within the system . . . EF! organizers envisioned a symbiotic relationship between the two wings of the movement.”133
Although the liberal left often denounces fringe action, the right wing understands the importance of the Overton Window very well. A rightwing think tank first articulated the idea. Indeed, the right wing in North America has been very successful at driving the political climate continuously rightward for the past several decades, to the point where formerly “centrist” parties adopt policies that were considered right-wing not many years ago. The right has used many different techniques to achieve this political shift, including continuous propaganda through ownership of the corporate media. But one of the most important techniques has been the shifting of the Overton Window. This is the role played by Fox News and Breitbart, and especially by their most extreme and vicious pundits. By constantly and loudly pushing the boundaries of the right wing, they have cleared the way for the majority to shift rightward as the liberals stumble along behind in an attempt to appear serious and credible. (This is a conscious strategy; Glenn Beck even wrote a book titled The Overton Window.)
The liberal left, which periodically purges itself of radicals and radical ideas, has no countervailing force or vigor. Rather than going on the offensive, it is constantly backpedaling in an attempt to appear acceptable. Liberals mocked the extremism and outright silliness of Beck, smiled smugly when Sarah Palin was defeated in an election. But their role was not to get elected or to be embraced by the mainstream—it was to drive the mainstream ever rightward so that more extreme corporate policies will seem acceptable, and even desirable. And indeed, with the election of Donald Trump, this strategy has again proved fruitful for the far right.
Perhaps you’ve noticed, as I have, that there is a particularly destructive dynamic at work in electoral politics between liberals and conservatives, or between Democrats and Republicans (especially on economic policy). When the right-wing parties are in power, they push forward privatization, cuts to social programs, and generally do their best to move wealth from the commons into private pockets. Eventually, enough people become angry at this that the right-wing is thrown out of government, and a more liberal party is elected to bring change (change you can believe in!). But when that supposedly liberal party comes into power they very rarely reverse any conservative economic policies. Quite the contrary—they often keep the changes of their predecessors, or even advance them incrementally.134
It works the same in many different places.135 By swapping places every term or two, the dominant political parties can advance the capitalist policies desired by the corporations that fund them both so generously.
The two parties, seemingly locked in combat, are instead part of the same dreadful mechanism. They function as a ratchet. The corporate conservatives push the toothed wheel of the ratchet forward. And the liberal party acts as the stopper, preventing the people from pushing public policy back to its previous state.
This is not how things must work if we want to move in a progressive direction instead of a corporate one. Like the Overton Window, the left can use this ratcheting mechanism for good instead of evil. Effective political movements throughout history (especially resistance movements) have built ratchets for beneficial change through alliances of moderates and militants. Militants have pushed change forward through direct and rebellious action, and moderates have helped to cement that change by building organizations and sometimes by institutionalizing that change.
If the militant impulse is to challenge and disrupt those in power, the moderate impulse is often to try to converse or negotiate with the powerful. One main reason that militants and moderates may have a rocky relationship is that militants want to create discomfort for people of privilege, and moderates want to relieve it.
“The emphasis of the direct action groups is to place pressure upon the power structure . . . by economic, political, and moral leverage,” explain Martin Oppenheimer and George Lakey. “Direct action groups do engage in negotiation, but their efforts are less an attempt to get an agreement within the power structures as to how to deal with the situation, and more toward confronting the whole power structure with a conflict situation with which it must somehow come to terms.”136
Liberal groups which focus on negotiation can undermine grassroots groups, for example by taking credit for progress that only happened because of militant grassroots action. The authors of Resource Manual for a Living Revolution explain: “Direct action groups welcome negotiation, and welcome the existence of the traditional intergroup relations organizations. But they are frequently sceptical of the efforts of such groups, because too often their existence has been a cover-up for the impression that something is being done, while nothing is really changing.”137
Liberals often see the immediate conflict as the problem to be dealt with, but ignore the underlying power imbalance and root problems. If Black Lives Matter protests in the street, liberals may be more concerned about the possibility of a riot than the centuries of injustice and violence that triggered that protest in the first place.
If there is a conflict between police and tree-sitters, liberals may see their task as negotiating a way to get the sitters out of a trees—thus removing the immediate cause of the conflict—rather than ensuring the survival of the forest. Or if Black Freedom Riders are at risk of being beaten up by Klansmen, liberals see their role as being to send those Freedom Riders safely up north, rather than joining them on the Greyhound or fighting to put an end to Jim Crow.
Liberals will sometimes pat themselves on the back for negotiating the “end” of a conflict even when they have undercut a community mobilization and made it even harder to solve the original problem. Radicals see this behavior as shortsighted, arrogant, and even treacherous. And often they are right.
The use of flanking as a tactic is very old. The culture of Ancient Greece was shaped early on by a particular kind of fighter: the hoplite. It was because of the hoplites that new, more democratic cities like Athens were able to defeat the old kings and aristocrats. The hoplites were not mere individuals in duels or skirmishes on the battlefield; they fought as a united group. Each hoplite was armed with a spear in his right hand and a large shield on his left arm. With this shield he gave shelter partly to himself, and partly to the man on his left. Hoplites were organized into a phalanx, a rectangular formation which might be five or ten or twenty rows deep, and as wide as it needed to be. The row at the front was engaged in direct combat while those in the rows behind would push forward (battles were, in part, giant shoving matches). If a fighter at the front fell, it was the job of the person behind him to step forward and take his place, to maintain the integrity of the formation.
The hoplite phalanx presented a solid line of shields and spears to the opposing army. From the front, it was very difficult to break through its lines. The hoplite phalanxes in Ancient Greece were almost always victorious over non-hoplite fighters, so long as the battle took place on level terrain.
Given the strength of the front, it was the sides of the formation that were vulnerable to attack. The soldiers there were most exposed, especially those at the right corner of the formation, for they had no shield-bearing comrade to protect them. And so, when the hoplites were marching into battle, those at the corner would unconsciously drift to the right, where they felt more sheltered. The whole formation would then drift to the right, exposing the left side to enemy troops. To compensate for this, commanders would put their most experienced soldiers at that front corner. It was their job to hold the line.
This was essential. The front of the formation was a solid barrier of shields and spears, but if the left side—the flank—became exposed it would be easily overwhelmed. The soldiers at that corner were already fully engaged in fighting the enemy in front of them—if they were simultaneously attacked from the side they would easily be killed. If a formation of hoplites was outflanked, the enemy could move down the entire line like a zipper, killing soldier after soldier.
Then the hoplites, in fear, would break ranks and flee. They would drop their shields so that they could run more quickly. This was when the real slaughter began. The unprotected backs of the fleeing hoplites presented an easy target for the winning army. The vanquished troops would quickly be dispatched if they couldn’t get away.
So it has been with progressive movements in past decades. Large leftist organizations, in leaving out the radical, no-compromise, never-give-up types, have gotten rid of exactly the people who should have been the fighters on that front corner of the formation. And so those who remained have drifted to the right, and left their flank exposed. They have been routed, they are in disarray, and on the retreat.
I’ll come back to this issue later. But this problem can be addressed in part by having clear and specific goals—by agreeing on some common vision—and in part by ensuring that negotiating groups take a radical approach rather than a liberal one. Oppenheimer and Lakey explain: “This will tend to make for a more far-reaching and realistic solution to the conflict situation, rather than a mere postponement, or controlling, of the conflict.”138
The existence of vigorously militant groups makes the work of moderate groups much easier. In political science it’s called radical flanking. (Some people call it “good cop, bad cop.”)
There were many examples during the civil rights struggle. That New York Post cartoon was a perfect illustration. The existence of the Deacons for Defense often made life much easier for nonviolent groups for the NAACP—not just because of physical protection, but because they made the NAACP seem comparatively reasonable.139
The goal of liberals is often to elect someone to put their desired policy into practice. But historically, major political changes don’t happen because sympathetic politicians are elected. They happen because politicians are afraid of the people and of radical social movements.
Important political concessions often come from unfriendly politicians when sufficient political force is employed. Ralph Nader argues: “Nixon did things that horrified conservatives. He signed into law the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and air and water pollution acts because he was afraid of popular opinion, following the rumble that came out of the 1960s. He was the last Republican president to be afraid of liberals.”140
During the Vietnam War, some defense “experts” tried to convince President Johnson to drop nuclear bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong, arguing that doing so would save American lives (like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki supposedly had). Johnson immediately rejected the idea. He did not reject their proposal out of concern for the lives of Vietnamese people, obviously, since Vietnam was daily being napalmed and carpet-bombed with conventional explosives. Rather, Johnson turned to the experts and demanded to know “how long will it take five hundred thousand angry Americans to climb that White House wall out there and lynch their President if he does something like that?”141
So it was during the Great Depression, a time when those in power were increasingly afraid of revolution. Advances that liberals celebrated for decades afterward—like Roosevelt’s “New Deal” social programs and employment initiatives—only happened because of the militant organizing that historian Charles Beard called “thunder on the left.”142 Similar dynamics were at work in Italy during the 1970s, when the government instituted far-reaching social reforms to try to undermine the support base of the guerrilla Red Brigades.143
The work of the 1980s militant group Direct Action (also known as the Squamish Five), clearly illustrates how militant action can support and invigorate the work of a larger nonviolent movement.
Direct Action was formed in 1980 in Vancouver; along with Ann Hansen and Julie Belmas (mentioned in the story of the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade) the group included Brent Taylor, Doug Stewart, and Gerry Hannah. They created the group in response to a lack of militant action, as Hansen explains:
Within the social context of North America, we didn’t think that militant actions were more important than legal protest, but considering the virtual vacuum in terms of militancy, we decided this was the area in which we would have the most impact. We were not under any illusions that Direct Action on its own would spark a massive revolutionary movement, but we hoped that our actions in concert with the protests of the radical movement would contribute to building a stronger revolutionary movement. Even though the size and development of the revolutionary forces in Canada were miniscule at best, we did not think that controversial militant actions would inhibit them. On the contrary, history has shown that militant actions can be a catalyst for growth in the early phases of a revolutionary movement’s development.”
For their first big action, they targeted a new power line (being built to supply electricity for industrial resource extraction on Indigenous land) and blew up its transformers.
Although the group did regular target practice, they chose to attack infrastructure, not human beings. Hansen writes:
In our analysis of capitalism, value is only placed on property and money. . . . The only time [capitalist leaders] really seem to respond is when such attacks threaten the loss of revenue, shares, investments, and wealth. Time and time again, we witnessed corporations pulling out of regions where their investments were in jeopardy. . . . Based on these observations, we decided to direct our campaign against property.
This decision was based more on efficacy than on ethics. If a person wants to immobilize a car, they wouldn’t damage the rear view mirror or the upholstery, they would ruin the engine, the most expensive and most difficult part of the car to repair.
The Vancouver-based cell decided that their next big action would take place in Toronto, Ontario, where Litton Industries was manufacturing guidance systems for cruise missiles. There was a large peace movement in Canada and the United States at the time, but the movement had won few concrete victories. An aboveground campaign against Litton Industries had not stopped the company and appeared to be flagging.
For Direct Action this appeared to be a good campaign to aid because, as Hansen wrote, “it would be more effective to target an issue around which a popular struggle had already mobilized so people would understand why we had carried out the action. We could enhance the effectiveness of a popular movement by acting in concert with it, rather than in isolation and potentially hindering its development.”144
Direct Action stole explosives from a remote construction site in British Columbia and drove to Ontario with them. They set up new lives in Toronto using fake identification, and carefully built a bomb into the back of a van. They conducted reconnaissance at the factory and meticulously planned out the action, including multiple steps to warn people at the site to evacuate: a warning phone call about the bomb, a sign on the van reiterating the need to evacuate, and so on.
The night they pulled their explosive-filled van into the Litton Industries site, security was surprisingly lax. They drove the van up out of the parking lot and onto the grass in front of the security tower. Ann told me that she could see the security guards through the windows, sitting in their tower and reading magazines, oblivious.
Unfortunately, the bombing did not go as planned, because of a series of events that Hansen details in her memoir. Direct Action’s warning call to the plant was not fully understood by the security guards and so the plant was not evacuated. An additional explanatory sign and a stick of explosives was placed on the hood of the van with the bomb, but guards apparently thought that the visible stick was the bomb and did not get close enough to read the sign. And then, when large numbers of police arrived, their powerful radio transmitters detonated the bomb ahead of schedule. Several people were injured, one seriously.
Two colleagues of mine were in an aboveground group at the time which was also named, by coincidence, “Direct Action.” They were deluged by phone calls from the media. My colleagues’ immediate presumption was that the attack on Litton Industries had been staged as an attempt to discredit the peace movement. (They learned otherwise, and would later provide prisoner support to Ann and Brent when they were moved to prisons here in Kingston.)
Although Direct Action issued an apology once they learned of injuries, many in the peace movement condemned them. Jim Douglass opposed guerrilla groups in general: “I think the process is also contrary to non-violence. It involves extreme secrecy and not taking responsibility for the action. It is only through a growth and acceptance of responsibility that we’re going to stop the war-making.” Phil Berrigan tried to keep things in perspective: “However benighted such an attempt might be, it is better than doing nothing against war preparations, especially the nuclear kind.”145 Some protesters would later be seen holding similarly supportive signs reading: “The real terrorists are Litton Inc.”
Direct Action expressed regret over the injuries and blamed the problem partly on inadequate reconnaissance of the site. Hansen also pointed out that while they had made a serious error, “mistakes are inevitable and we can’t let our fear of making them paralyze the movement. Remaining passive in the face of today’s global human and environmental destruction will create deeper scars than those resulting from the mistakes we will inevitably make by taking action.”146
Mistakes aside, the bombing had a beneficial effect on the movement against cruise missiles. Attendance at protests increased immediately. A demonstration in Ottawa two weeks after the bombing was the largest antinuclear protest in Canadian history. Mainstream antinuclear group Operation Dismantle would triple in size in the year after the bombing. The new enthusiasm and mobilization spawned serious civil-disobedience actions at the Litton Industries site.
And, critically, Litton Industries lost a manufacturing contract to build the guidance system for future US cruise missiles. The president of Litton Industries blamed the protesters and the bombing.147
Looking back, Hansen believes that the bombing itself was so spectacular that it inevitably alienated some people. Unlike the arsons by the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade, it was difficult for regular people to imagine themselves carrying out such a sophisticated and dangerous action. “Militant direct action using low-tech forms such as arson and property destruction, with which the average person can identify, is . . . far more likely to be supported than high-tech actions such as those necessitating explosives, robberies, and false identification.”
The spectacular nature of the bombing also provoked a massive hunt for the members of Direct Action. By spending enormous amounts of money and time—and by matching writing in a Direct Action communiqué with previous writing in an aboveground zine—the police were eventually able to track and capture the members of Direct Action.
I sat down with Ann and asked her about her experiences, and how she felt about the actions that put her in jail for seven years and on parole for the rest of her life. “I don’t regret it,” she told me. Prison, she explained, is not the worst thing in the world. “It’s better than being alone in the suburbs,” she said.
“Of course, there were some major, sloppy logistical errors, in particular with the Litton action. As I’ve said many times, we shouldn’t have placed a bomb in a building where people were working and depend on the authorities following our instructions to secure the safety of those workers. However, as I’ve also said, mistakes are inevitable in any political campaign, big or small, legal or militant. The more militant the actions, the more serious the repercussions will be for any mistakes.”
She added: “There are many political situations in which sabotage of that nature would be appropriate and effective. In more simple terms, I think the decisions to use firebombs, or explosives or vandalism or any militant action is a tactical one whose success will be determined by whether the action accomplishes its goal.”
DIVERSITY OF TACTICS
Every movement must make important decisions about both strategy—a broad plan for making progress—and tactics—specific actions that advance the overall plan.
In the mythology of the liberal left, a movement must stick with one narrow set of tactics—like persuasive nonviolence or protests and lobbying. But the historical reality is that successful movements almost always use a diversity of tactics. The Deacons for Defense are a perfect example. Lance Hill explains: “The Deacons did not see their self-defense activities as mutually exclusive of nonviolent tactics and voter registration. Viewing themselves as part of the broader civil rights movement, they did not oppose nonviolent direct action—indeed, they supported it, employed it as a tactic, and expended most of their energy defending its practitioners. What the Deacons opposed was the dogmatic idea that nonviolent direct action precluded self-defense. The Deacons evolved a more flexible strategy—similar to the 1930s labor movement—that employed tactics of nonviolence, direct action, symbolic protest, and the judicious use of defensive force.”148
Successful resistance movements make intelligent and pragmatic choices that draw from a whole spectrum of action. Let’s explore, for a moment, what that means. Take a look at this illustration: Taxonomy of Action (figure 3-4).
We can start by dividing all action into either acts of commission (things you do) and acts of omission (things you don’t do).149 When we look at these tactics and consider applying them to situations in the modern day, we have to ask: can these tactics be effective for us? Or to put the question another way: can these tactics maximize our political force, and direct that force intelligently?
Acts of omission (like strikes, boycotts, or tax refusal) can be very effective if large numbers of people join in. If a strike in an industrial site is going to be effective, nearly all of the workers must participate. The Montgomery Bus Boycott worked because the entire Black community participated. Margaret Thatcher’s attempted poll tax around 1990 had to be abolished because one-fourth of people refused to pay it.
Figure 3-4: A Taxonomy of Action
Mass noncooperation can grind economies to a halt, mobilize millions, and terrify those in power. As unions have long demonstrated, noncooperation can work on every scale, from individual workshops and factories through to general strikes that shut down whole cities or countries. But there are important limitations and caveats.
First of all, although noncooperation in general is on the lower-risk side of the spectrum, it is no guarantee of safety. In the 1930s, the biggest purchasers of tear gas and other toxic weapons were not law-enforcement agencies, but corporations, which stockpiled the chemical weapons along with arsenals of firearms and ammunition to use against striking workers.150 Refraining from violence does not make you safe; if you truly threaten the entitlement of those in power, they will attack.
Second is the issue of numbers. Because the force exerted by each person in (for example) a boycott is very small, many boycotters are needed. Such large operations are most effective once a movement is already well-established and popular. And because of automation, many acts of omission are less and less effective. There was a time when fielding an army to wage war or destroy a city took the active cooperation of hundreds of thousands of people. Now entire nuclear arsenals can be launched by a handful of people.
The third and most important limitation is that noncooperation is only effective for people who are already participating in the dominant system and can (temporarily or indefinitely) withhold their work and cooperation. The people who have been impoverished by global capitalism cannot abolish that system through boycotts. Unemployed people cannot walk off their jobs. Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest cannot stop deforestation by refusing to pay taxes or eat at McDonald’s. A people will have little success with noncooperation if the powers that be have already deemed them expendable or subhuman.
It’s important, also, to remember that when acts of omission are used successfully it is part of a larger strategy that includes acts of commission. A strike could not endure without a union organizing to create a strike fund; mass tax refusal would not take place without a large-scale awareness-raising campaign to support it; conscientious refusal of military service may require the building of a sophisticated support network to protect conscientious objectors or their families. Simple withdrawal or noncooperation does not, by itself, bring about victory, and effective campaigns of mass noncooperation still require diverse tactics.
In general, acts of commission offer more flexibility and more opportunities to maximize force. As you can see, there is a spectrum of action ranging from the most indirect action to the most direct. I’ll summarize these in brief, but we’ll come back to them in chapter 11, “Actions & Tactics.”
On the most indirect end of the scale are the acts of commission like lobbying politicians. This is very indirect; it means asking those in power to tell other people to do things for you. Tactics on the indirect end require more people because—like the acts of omission—they generate less political force. Many potential voters are needed to convince a politician to do something differently. Next along the continuum are protests and symbolic acts that appeal to the public and the media. Big marches are a little bit more direct because they can be a show of strength and a mobilization of supporters, instead of mere supplication. But polite protests usually aren’t disruptive enough to generate much political force.
Education and awareness raising initiatives go further in that they can be a way of actively recruiting people into a movement. Ideally, they don’t just push people to make superficial changes in their lives, but to gain a deeper political understanding and act on it. Next, building alternatives can include anything from growing food to creating local conflict resolution and justice systems. These are often not very effective in a strategy of withdrawal alone, as I have discussed, but are essential in a wider strategy of real resistance.
Those final tactics on the right side engage much more political force but they do so with more risk. A handful of saboteurs in the Elaho Valley shut down logging operations that thousands of protesters couldn’t slow. Even if millions of people had participated in a boycott of the Red Hot Video stores, they wouldn’t have accomplished what a dozen members of the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade were able to do virtually overnight. The Freedom Riders created a conflict greater and more acute than a thousand sympathetic speeches and anti-segregation pamphlets. Mass tactics are totally valid and important in the scheme of things, but the direct application of force allows small numbers of people to create change very quickly.
There are two parts to this final part of the spectrum: capacity building and supporting resisters is one, direct confrontation and conflict is the other. And these two parts must be understood together. Only 2 or 3 percent of the people in any resistance movement are engaged in direct confrontation and conflict with power, whether that means lunch-counter sit-ins, Indigenous road blockades, or guerrilla warfare. The great majority of those involved are mostly building capacity and supporting those who are on the front lines at any given time. That includes recruiting and training new people, whether that training is in nonviolent civil disobedience or in small arms. That means gathering and passing on intelligence and messages, it means offering safe houses and transportation, it means feeding and housing and clothing people.
The combatants of the Warsaw Ghetto would never have been able to fight if it weren’t for the hidden arms factories, the people (mostly women) who smuggled in guns and food, those willing to shelter them and keep lookout for soldiers. And the striking coal miners of Matewan, West Virginia, could never have sustained their action if their community hadn’t worked together to feed and shelter them.
We can further subdivide direct conflict and confrontation into tactics like occupations and blockades, expropriation, property and material destruction, and actual violence (including self-defense). I do not consider property destruction to be inherently violent. Often the opposite is true: sometimes the very existence of property—be it a dam or an oil well or a vivisection lab—requires violence against workers, Indigenous people, or the planet itself. And sometimes the dismantling or destruction of that infrastructure is the only way to stop the violence it perpetuates.
All in all, the number of people available determines the tactics that can be used effectively. The people of India, in trying to drive out the British Empire, vastly outnumbered white colonials, so they often used mass noncooperation along with other tactics. This contrasts with Jewish people in Nazi Germany, who were outnumbered by a hostile or indifferent population and could resist effectively through armed self-defense or clandestine action.
Sometimes liberals—oblivious as they sometimes are to entrenched systems of power—will criticize people like the Deacons or the Libyan freedom fighters for “choosing” violence. During the “Arab Spring,” many liberals seemed to believe that the (ostensibly nonviolent) uprising in Egypt was a good choice, and the armed conflict in Libya was a bad choice. But resisters do not choose how violent their occupational government is. Effective tactics are not a function of moral yearning—they depend on the nature of the oppressive system that must be fought. As Nelson Mandela said, the oppressor determines what tactics must be used to dislodge them.
The end goal of a movement (and the nature of the opposition) determine how much political force is required. If you only want to convince a coffee chain to serve drinks in recycled paper cups instead of Styrofoam, then sure, a boycott could probably do it. If you want to abolish slavery or end a military occupation, you are going to need a hell of a lot more force.
Successful movements use tactics from across the spectrum. The civil rights struggle used literally everything on this taxonomy, from boycotts through protest and mutual support all the way to armed self-defense. The same goes for the fight to end South African apartheid, which won through a combination of international solidarity boycotts and divestment, popular protest, sabotage, and armed attacks. American revolutionaries similarly defeated the British by diverse action, from building up local alternatives like revolutionary courts and cloth production, to property destruction like the Boston Tea Party, to the eventual armed conflict. The same goes for pretty much every successful revolution in history.151
That said, resistance movements under repressive or totalitarian governments often don’t spend as much time or energy on the indirect side of the action spectrum, since they understand that lobbying is pointless and since public protest can make them more vulnerable to repressive violence. Outright revolutionary movements similarly deemphasize lobbying and symbolic protests because they understand that they are in a war and that they must either destroy the occupiers or be destroyed by them. In other words, serious and established resistance movements often abandon the tactics used most often by the liberal left. And they know that effective disruption can cause those in power to request negotiations, thereby realizing goals of lobbying indirectly.
In any case, by using many different and complementary tactics, resistance movements maximize their effectiveness and overcome the limitations that each of the tactics have alone.
All that said, there are some genuine and intelligent concerns about the use of a diversity of tactics. Let me give two related examples, and then I’ll respond to both.
In an open letter to the Occupy Movement, author and writer Starhawk and some of her colleagues argue that a diversity of tactics “lets us off the hook from doing the hard work of debating our positions and coming to agreements about how we want to act together. It becomes a code for ‘anything goes’ and makes it impossible for our movements to hold anyone accountable for their actions.”152
Another intelligent concern is laid out by activist and author George Lakey in his essay “Nonviolent Action as the Sword that Heals: Challenging Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology.” Lakey and I agree about many things, including the need for militant and serious action. We part ways, however, on diversity of tactics, which he compares to a shoddily constructed house:
Diversity of tactics open to all possibilities is like trying to build a house without a strategy, a house that includes solar panels, a woodburning stove, a massive oil furnace, electric baseboard heating, huge windows facing north, asbestos insulation, a Jacuzzi in every bedroom, a meditation room dedicated to simplicity, and so on. When we build a house we do make choices, guided by some overall concept. That’s what makes sense when building a house or when building a revolutionary movement.153
Lakey makes an important and valid point: tactics can conflict with one another, and we must try to choose complementary tactics within some overall strategy. But those tactics can still be diverse, just as a house can have diverse sources of heat. My house has several large south-facing windows to catch heat from the sun, and a roof overhang to block that sun in summer. It has a woodburning stove, a few baseboard heaters, and thick straw bale walls for thermal mass and insulation. These are diverse, but complementary.
But for me a house is not the best analogy for a movement. A house might be analogous to a particular group, or even a particular organization that has to maintain internal consistency. One group can be centrally planned and built, just as a house can. But an entire movement is more like a neighborhood, with many houses each built on their own internal logic.
Rather than houses, I think about cultures of resistance as ecologies. Robust ecologies—like healthy cultures—are necessarily diverse. In any ecology individual organisms must be internally consistent to survive; they must have body parts that match, that are suited to their niche. You might expect to see a single animal with wings, webbed feet, and waterproof feathers, and a sensitive probing bill, such as a duck. It would make sense for a land predator to have camouflaging fur, keen eyes, sharp teeth, and strong, fast legs, like a wolf. It would be consistent for a grazing animal to have a complex fermenting digestive tract, grinding teeth, and a tendency to travel in large herds for company and mutual protection, like buffalo.
It would not make sense for an animal to have sharp predator’s teeth, webbed feet on stubby little legs, and a large fermenting gut. Those are not complementary features. An animal with that combination of body parts probably won’t last long. You would not expect to see those features on the same animal—you would, however, expect to see them in the same ecology. A duck, a wolf, and a buffalo could all inhabit the same landscape. The beauty and functionality of an ecology come from the great diversity that it encompasses.
In the same way, a particular resistance group should be internally consistent. Every aspect of a resistance group—from decision-making to structure to tactics to recruitment methods—flows from the ultimate goals and strategy of that group. A group should be consistent internally, but that doesn’t mean it should be the same as all other groups in a movement. It makes perfect sense for a movement to include both large, moderate organizations and clandestine militants—as Direct Action organized in the broader peace movement. (I’ll come back to the details of this in chapter 5: Groups & Organizations.)
In any case, part of what both Starhawk and Lakey are complaining about when they criticize a diversity of tactics is really a lack of clear strategy. And that is a concern I share wholeheartedly. A diversity of tactics is not a substitute for good strategy. It is, however, a way to keep groups from attacking each other—to keep that resistance ecology harmonious—as strategy is developed.
If you refuse a diversity of tactics, however, and choose a “tactical monoculture,” then you are making a strategic choice. And if you want a tactic to be acceptable to everyone in the movement, then you are left with the lowest common denominator. You are left with the status quo, or worse, because you are never going to get everyone sympathetic to your cause to agree on anything more than sternly worded protest signs. If “diversity of tactics” is really code for “anything goes,” then a tactical monoculture means “nothing changes.”
I agree that actions undertaken in a diversity of tactics sometimes don’t accomplish much. I have seen plenty of window smashing at protests that didn’t amount to much actual disruption. Usually these windows are easily and quickly replaced. I’ve also seen corporate stores shut down and boarded up in advance of diversity-of-tactics-type protests, and financial districts grind to a halt. I’ve seen news reports of entire cities economically shut down in Greece because of property destruction at anti-austerity protests.
People who smash windows mostly do so because they (legitimately and correctly) feel that purely symbolic protest is inadequate to stop the systems of power that are destroying our world. They strike out at the easiest and most convenient targets, even though they aren’t very important. If they had more organization or capacity they would presumably go after the more important targets. (There are principles for good target selection; see chapter 11.)
The problem is that most people don’t talk about the more important targets. So many people are afraid to talk about tactics beyond symbolic protest, even in theoretical terms. They speak in hushed voices, with euphemisms and allusions. (And I don’t mean for reasons of security culture, which I’ll come back to in chapter 6.)
A refusal to talk about serious direct action—especially with young people—is the activist equivalent of abstinence-only sex education: “Ladies simply don’t ask questions about those things, young woman.” Abstinence-only sex education does not prevent pregnancy or disease—quite the opposite. Nor does an aloof, pacifist-only monologue of change help social movements make good decisions or, in the long term, reduce violence.
People need information about how resistance movements really work, even if those dialogues are sometimes scary or uncomfortable. They do not need sanitized and phony versions of history that exclude uncomfortable parts like property destruction or armed self-defense. If people are not taught about their cultural history, if they do not get the information they need, then of course they are going to end up in bad situations. And of course they will repeat the same mistakes that many others have made, and our movements will pay the price. As Lance Hill wrote, a dogmatic refusal to consider other tactics “ultimately delivered young people into the hands of street violence” because there was no organized alternative until more developed organizations arose.
Sure, people using a variety of tactics will sometimes make mistakes. But it goes both ways. Inappropriate tactics aren’t always the spectacular, high-risk ones. I can’t think of a serious movement that was derailed by property destruction. To the contrary, I can think of many movements that were invigorated by such escalation—like the Canadian anti–cruise missile movement—even when it wasn’t decisive. There are definitely movements that escalated conflicts in unstrategic ways—trying to gain and hold territory when they aren’t yet ready, for example. But bad strategy is not unique to militant movements—plenty of liberal campaigns make bad strategic choices, it’s just harder to notice because they were less likely to win anything in the first place.
On the other hand, I can think of many resistance movements that were derailed or marginalized because they shied away from disruption to become lobbyists, because they negotiated too early or too easily, or because they were co-opted by those in power. Though militant groups like the Weather Underground or the Red Army Faction may become isolated from the movements that spawned them, their actions—even reckless ones—rarely destroy that movement. Liberal co-optation and capitulation, in contrast, has undermined and destroyed many a movement.
It’s often the most marginalized communities that are fighting back the hardest, and who understand from hard experience that merely lobbying and pleading aren’t going to get them anywhere. I’ve witnessed, on more than one occasion, white pacifists come into Indigenous circles to try to lecture them about pacifism. This insistence on a tactical monoculture is not inclusive—quite the opposite, it is divisive in that it often excludes the people who are already marginalized and ready to fight.
Of course, lobbying and negotiation is never what people want to get rid of when they talk about refusing a diversity of tactics, because it is the lowest common denominator. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful. And that’s the subject of our next section.
DISRUPTION AND POOR PEOPLE’S MOVEMENTS
We can learn a lot about the dynamics between militants and moderates by reading Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s landmark book Poor People’s Movements: Why they succeed, how they fail. In this book, Piven and Cloward examine a series of historical struggles to determine how poor people—and by extension other groups with little political status or leverage—actually achieve material gains. Their central conclusion is that disruption and defiance is the critical factor in gaining ground and forcing concessions from those in power.
Piven and Cloward argue that attempts to build politically acceptable and formal mass organizations often backfire because they quash the unruly and militant action that is needed to disrupt business as usual:
The more important point is that by endeavoring to do what they cannot do, organizers fail to do what they can do. During those brief periods in which people are roused to indignation, when they are prepared to defy the authorities to whom they ordinarily defer, during those brief moments when lower-class groups exert some force against the state, those who call themselves leaders do not usually escalate the momentum of the people’s protests. They do not because they are preoccupied with trying to build and sustain embryonic formal organizations in the sure conviction that these organizations will enlarge and become powerful.154
In their case studies, they add: “Organizers not only failed to seize the opportunity presented by the rise of unrest, they typically acted in ways that blunted or curbed the disruptive force which lower-class people were sometimes able to mobilize.”155
Their analysis of the anti-poverty and labor movements during the Depression illustrate many of the points I am trying to make here. Despite the attempts of the capitalist class to increase exploitation during the Depression (a crisis they triggered through their own greed) resistance organizers were able to fight back and achieve material gains. Such resisters were directly responsible for preventing or reversing thousands of evictions, and won relief payments for thousands upon tens of thousands of families. They won better wages and hours for workers, and they directly ensured that many of those worst affected by the Depression had access to food, housing, and utilities.
These successes came because of their willingness to use a diversity of tactics. There were symbolic protests, yes. But there was also mass food looting events by hungry people.156 There were “rent riots” in which crowds of people would converge on an evicted family and reinstall them and their belongings into their home.157 Communists set up gas and electric squads to reconnect the utilities of people whose services had been shut off.158
Crowds would sometimes storm and occupy relief offices (often issuing specific demands) until people were given the services they needed to survive.159 These tactics were often successful for particular families and even larger groups. For example: “In Atlanta in June 1932 city and county authorities decided to drop 23,000 families from the relief rolls, claiming there were no funds. To maintain a degree of order in the face of this decision, local authorities proceeded to arrest hundreds of farm workers (who had come to Atlanta in search of work) on charges of vagrancy, in order to send them back to the countryside. But when a thousand of the unemployed rallied at the courthouse, the order to cut the families was rescinded, and additional money was appropriated for relief.”160
On a local level these successes were self-sustaining: “The ability of the local groups to attract followers had depended on their concrete victories in the relief centers.”161 And so, groups that had won victories could attract more supporters and go on to be more successful. (It was a kind of evolution, selecting for more effective grassroots groups.)
Similar victories came in the factories. Piven and Cloward argue again that labor success came not from well-organized unions, but from disruption. “Factory workers had their greatest influence and were able to extract their most substantial concessions from government during the early years of the Great Depression before they were organized into unions. Their power was not rooted in organization, but in their capacity to disrupt the economy.”162 Piven and Cloward add: “The workers paid heavily for their defiance, in thousands arrested, hundreds injured, and many killed. But then, they also won.”163
These early successes elicited a repressive response from those in power. The defiant spirit that led to victories was suppressed as the Depression wore on, both by the government and by many of the formal organizations that claimed to represent the poor and marginalized. Employers tried to encourage schisms between workers along ethnic lines, often successfully.164 Established labor unions like the AFL did their best to purge and suppress radical organizers. And sometimes strikers and others were simply attacked by police, the army, and private security.
But those in power also used subtler means to quash resistance. The Roosevelt administration was successfully pressured into giving more relief funds, but they were also able to co-opt local resistance by hiring the organizers to work at relief offices. This happened, Piven and Cloward explain, “largely as a result of the Roosevelt Administration’s more liberal relief machinery, which diverted local groups from disruptive tactics and absorbed local leaders in bureaucratic roles. And once the movement weakened . . . relief was cut back.”165
Simultaneously, the relief system was changed to make it less vulnerable to grassroots pressure. Formalized grievance processes were set up to try to discourage the militant delegations and office occupations. Chicago created a single grievance office and national liberal organizations (in conjunction with co-opted local leaders) diverted community anger into a bureaucratic sinkhole. “The introduction of a centralized grievance office stripped the Chicago unemployed groups of their main weapon against the relief centers. As a result, their membership declined, and internal dissension among the groups increased.”166 There, again, is the horizontal hostility that divides and disrupts movements when they are unable to be effective. And so the militant anti-poverty movements declined:
What leverage these groups had exerted on local relief officials resulted from the very disturbances, the “pressure tactics,” which both leaders and administrators later scorned as primitive. Victories in obtaining relief had been won by mobilizing people for abrasive demonstrations and by demanding benefits on the spot for hundreds of people. By abandoning disruptive tactics in favor of bureaucratic procedures, the movement lost the ability to influence relief decisions in the local offices. . . . With the force of the movement lost, with its local leaders engaged in bureaucratic minuets, and with its national leaders concentrating on legislative reform through the electoral system, relief officials soon regained control over the relief centers, and the national administration regained control of relief policy.167
Relief payments decreased, the demonization of the poor in the media increased, and defiance dwindled.168 The effect was felt directly by poor families and workers (in terrible housing, in empty bellies, in worn-out shoes, and by incarceration in workhouses for debtors).
I am not opposed to formal organization or to building popular consensus or to gaining the sympathies of new supporters. Indeed, good organization magnifies the impact of militancy. But if a movement chooses formality at the cost of disruptiveness, it has lost its main avenue for material success.169
The ability to inspire and demonstrate defiance is a key part of any resistance movement. Stan Goff (activist, author, and veteran) writes: “Rock throwing is the ultimate asymmetric warfare. It erases all the markers of combatants that formalize warfare. It is completely democratic. It is a first step across an invisible line between obedience and resistance, across the boundary of the taboo against physical resistance. . . . It is agile. It provokes, then moves. It requires no technology.”170 He argues that those on the left “will be transformed into leaders when we learn the lesson of rocks.”171
Imagine two movements: one is well-organized but uses a nonconfrontational tactical monoculture. The second is a loosely organized but disruptive movement that sometimes destroys property. If we must choose between the two movements, history suggests that the second type will be more effective.
Which is to say: for marginalized groups, militancy without organization is often more effective than organization without militancy.
But there is a third way: we can build movements that prioritize solidarity and a diversity of tactics while simultaneously building and critiquing our own strategy. Good organization can make a bit of militancy go far. Many of the effective movements discussed in this book—including the Deacons for Defense, the United Farm Workers, and ACT UP—were able to strike that balance. The key is to build organizational structures that are supportive rather than rigid, and that keep leaders accountable and responsive. (This is something we’ll come back to in more depth in chapter 5: Groups & Organizations.)
Tactical harmony won’t be reached by suppressing militant tactics in favor of the lowest common denominator. Instead, we must try to develop real strategies together, to support each other, and to encourage militancy that matches our situation.
MOVEMENT BUILDING
Divide and conquer is the basic operating principle of any empire. The success of struggles for justice—against poverty, colonialism, racism, sexism, and so on—depend heavily on our ability to overcome this very old strategy.
When the imperial powers of Europe wanted to colonize the Indigenous continents they called Australia and North America, they flooded these continents with poor white people. Those people were poor because they were exploited by the powerful, and they were criminalized for their poverty (like those sent to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread). In theory the European elites were the class enemy of both the Indigenous and the poor white people, but aristocrats were usually able to pit Indigenous people and poor Europeans against each other. (They were sometimes successful at pitting different Indigenous groups against each other, though oppressed groups occasionally joined together—like the Maroons, groups of escaped slaves and Indigenous people in the Caribbean and the South.)
Just prior to World War I, revolutionary spirit surged through Europe and North America—a spirit that was partly quenched when the working classes of various countries slaughtered each other in the trenches. Radical working-class organizing outside the war was perpetually stymied by the ability of the bosses to pit workers of different ethnic and national origins against each other. Consider this report from a visitor to a Chicago employment office in 1904: “I saw, seated on benches around the office, a sturdy group of blond-haired Nordics. I asked the employment agent, ‘How comes it you are employing only Swedes?’ He answered, ‘Well, you see, it is only for this week. Last week we employed Slovaks. We change about among different nationalities and languages. It prevents them from getting together. We have the thing systematized.’”172
Much later, as the civil rights struggle grew, it was often those whites on the bottom of the hierarchy who lashed out most violently against Black people—it was they who felt most threatened by the rising social status of Black people. Although the leadership of the KKK in the South overlapped heavily with the leadership of white civil society—police officers, church officials, politicians—those on the bottom served as foot soldiers.
Radical social movements have been torn apart by deep schisms even without outside manipulation. Far too many movements in history have been, for example, systemically sexist. The Black Panthers were disrupted by COINTELPRO, but internal attitudes against women (allowing abuse and rape) may have been even more damaging. In her gripping book A Taste of Power, Black Panther Elaine Brown tells how Huey Newton ordered the severe beating of a woman named Regina Davis; Davis ran the BPP liberation school, and had verbally criticized a male “comrade” for refusing to do a task he had been assigned. Elaine Brown wrote:
A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. A woman attempting the role of leadership was, to my proud Black Brothers, making an alliance with the ‘counter-revolutionary, man-hating, lesbian, feminist white bitches.’ It was a violation of some Black Power principle that was left undefined. If a Black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding Black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the Black race. She was an enemy of Black people.173
Black Panther Ashanti Omowali Alston adds: “COINTELPRO didn’t destroy the BPP. It merely capped on our own weaknesses that we couldn’t or didn’t have the understandings and tools to transform at the time. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, impatience.”174
Of course, the BPP was far from the only sexist movement of the 1960s; sexism is an attitude that transcends racial boundaries. Nor have feminist movements been free of racism or classism, of course, and nor have labor movements been free of sexism or racism. I’m not going to catalog such overlapping oppressions here. Other people have written more comprehensively and more eloquently than I about the intersections of race, class and gender, and how their effective navigation can make or break struggles for liberation.175
I simply want to make a point that I hope has become more obvious than it was during the 1960s: no movement can bring about a liberated future if that organization will not combat oppressive attitudes. Those oppressive attitudes may be sexism, racism, classism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, ageism, or something else. But a movement cannot wage political conflict effectively if it is too busy abusing or denigrating its own people and its closest allies.
Nor can such a movement make intelligent strategy or good decisions. It’s utterly foolish and destructive for any marginalized movement to, for example, exclude or suppress the participation of women through sexism. What movement can win by getting rid of 51 percent of its potential membership?
And no group can win by ignoring skill in favor of privilege. When a woman who is a brilliant strategist is ignored because a louder but less talented man is dominating the group, that group loses the benefits of her talents. And it’s not just a matter of failing to bring out the abilities of people who happen to be women. Those who are oppressed by power often have a better understanding of how power works—and how to fight it—than those who are privileged by power. (The case of the United Farm Workers, in chapter 12, shows how groups with less privilege may be smarter strategically.)
It’s extremely important—for both moral and strategic reasons—to work to wipe out sexism, and racism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia in all of our movements.
Some movements have consciously tried to overcome the divide-andconquer tactics of power. Such alliances surely go back to the dawn of empire. The Green Corn Rebellion, an Oklahoma-based uprising of 1917, is a good example. The rebellion emerged from rural discontent with long-term economic exploitation and mistreatment, exacerbated by the beginning of World War I and the military draft.
The uprising was carried out by a coalition of poor rural people including tenant farmers, Black people, white people, and Indigenous people including Seminoles and Muscogee Creeks. The Green Corn Rebellion had an unapologetically land-based character, and many of the rebels saw townspeople as part of the same exploiter class as financial magnates like J.P. Morgan. That exploiter class was responsible for variously taking the land of the Indigenous rebels and committing genocide against them, for enslaving the people of the Black rebels, and for economically exploiting the entire group through astronomically high rent and usury. The exploiter class stole their crops, and now through the draft, it wanted to steal their sons.
The Green Corn rebels were brought together by their common ties to the land and by their understanding that the war abroad was being waged for the capitalists and imperialists at the expense of their class. One of their manifestos read:
“Now is the time to rebel against this war with Germany, boys. Boys, get together and don’t go. Rich man’s war. Poor man’s fight. The war is over with Germany if you don’t go and J.P. Morgan & Co. is lost. Their great speculation is the only cause of the war.”
The uprising began with the cutting of telegraph lines and the burning of railway bridges. Their plan, somewhat naively, was to march east toward Washington, D.C., eating roasted green corn and beef for sustenance as they traveled. (Their intended food source was also the origin of their name.) They would join up with other rebellious rural folk as they went, and when the mass arrived at the White House they would end the war by kicking out President Wilson (who had just lied his way into reelection by claiming he would keep America out of the war).
But the rebels were betrayed by an informer, and a posse of well-armed townspeople attacked them as their march began. The campaign promptly disintegrated, and in the aftermath the uprising was used as an excuse for the government to crack down on both the Socialist Party and the Wobblies (who weren’t even involved—those in power will use any excuse for repression, regardless of whether that excuse is based in fact).
With such ambitious goals and such a confrontational attitude (but with a lack of security culture and strategic planning), it is perhaps no surprise that the Green Corn Rebellion did not succeed. Confrontation is important, but resistance movements also need to build up their other skills and capacities—including security, strategy, and logistics—so that they can win battles and sustain struggle.
Many historical movements consciously limited their short-term goals to build whatever unity they could, and to give themselves time to develop capacity and grow. The civil rights movement targeted segregation because they could maximize their support while minimizing repression. Many civil rights organizers understood that ending segregation alone would not secure economic justice. But they hoped to maximize their support (and to avoid being called Communists) by emphasizing their own patriotism and avoiding calls to redistribute wealth or (later) to end the war in Vietnam.
Late in the 1960s, after some legislative victories had been won, this changed. Martin Luther King Jr. called his friends and, ominously, asked them to join his “final campaign.” He publicly condemned the war in Vietnam (which he had previously avoided to prevent potential conflicts with supporters). He took poverty as his new enemy, and blamed the war for diverting money that could end poverty. The new movement—the Poor People’s Campaign—intended to use massive civil disobedience to force the end of the war in Vietnam, freeing up billions of dollars to abolish poverty, while also winning an economic bill of rights for all citizens. King worked to form an alliance of people from all races and backgrounds, united in this common goal.
It was an ambitious goal, and one that many civil rights supporters did not share. When King came out against the war, his own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, rejected him. The Northerners who had felt morally superior watching Southern bigots on television were not comfortable being confronted with problems for which they were culpable. The Johnson Administration didn’t want King to cause trouble for the Democrats then in power. And to see poor people of different ethnicities organizing together—and doing it militantly—terrified the capitalists as well.
King knew that he was taking on a difficult campaign that was unlikely to win. He also knew that there would be reprisals for going after such powerful interests. He appointed a whole new batch of officials, for redundancy, in case of assassinations. King himself had difficulty coping. Colleagues reported hearing him through hotel room walls late at night, drinking and yelling: “I don’t want to do this anymore! I want to go back to my little church!”176
On April 4, 1968, before the Poor People’s Campaign really got underway, King was assassinated in Memphis while assisting a sanitation workers’ strike. The Poor People’s Campaign, under attack and without substantial backing, did not achieve any decisive victories. But participation in the campaign and its march on Washington had a real effect on tens of thousands of people. It gave them a taste of a broad coalition and gave them experience in organizing across ethnic lines. As one historian explains, “Whether they went for months, weeks, or just a day or two, many marchers left Washington enlightened, if not transformed.”177
While the Poor People’s Campaign was taking place, a grassroots movement was being built in Chicago. The Rainbow Coalition was a movement that united people from many different backgrounds and ethnicities to fight poverty and attacks by police. It was young Black Panther Fred Hampton—already an incredible speaker and organizer in his late teens—who gave the coalition its name. And Hampton’s fellow activist Bobby Lee did much of the organizing.
The pan-ethnic coalition included a gamut of groups from leftist organizations to street gangs, from the Puerto Rican Young Lords to the Black Panthers to the Students for a Democratic Society. They stopped fighting each other, and united on the common basis of militant anti-poverty organizing. Bobby Lee explains: “The Rainbow Coalition was just a code word for class struggle.”178
The Rainbow Coalition was frightening to those in power because it overcame ethnic divisions. Bobby Lee explains: “Fred Hampton got the idea of the Rainbow Coalition right away. He had been involved with the NAACP as a youth, so he already had worked with white people, knew they weren’t all bad. It seems to me that a lot of the real intense government repression didn’t happen until the Black Panthers started building coalitions. Once the party departed from the ‘hate whitey’ trip and got serious about building real politics, we were a threat—plain and simple. The FBI were always watching us. But the Rainbow Coalition was their worst nightmare.”179
COINTELPRO responded with an FBI-orchestrated attack. One night in December 1969, a police infiltrator who had been acting as Fred Hampton’s bodyguard slipped Hampton a sedative. A police team burst through the apartment door a few hours later and shot another Panther in the apartment before proceeding to Hampton’s bedroom using a map given to them by their infiltrator. They fired nearly one hundred rounds into the bedroom as Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend lay beside him. They approached the bed a moment later and shot Hampton directly in the head. With the help of the media, the police spun a fantastic story about a shoot-out initiated by Hampton and the Panthers, but Hampton, drugged by police, never even woke up during the attack.
Hampton was twenty-one years old.
The mantle of the Rainbow Coalition—or the basic ideas behind it—would be carried by many other organizers in other places and times. One of those people was Judi Bari, an environmentalist and labor organizer who worked in northern California through the 1980s and ’90s. Bari was a factory worker, trade unionist, and carpenter who joined Earth First! and created a synthesis of radical left and environmental thought that would win important victories on both fronts.
I’ll talk about her organizing work in a moment, but first I want to touch on the philosophy that guided her work, which she explained in her essay “Revolutionary Ecology.” Judi Bari bemoaned the schisms between social ecologists and deep ecologists, between radical environmentalists and social justice activists, and even between forest defenders and timber workers. She wrote:
Starting from the very reasonable, but unfortunately revolutionary concept that social practices which threaten the continuation of life on Earth must be changed, we need a theory of revolutionary ecology that will encompass social and biological issues, class struggle, and a recognition of the role of global corporate capitalism in the oppression of peoples and the destruction of nature.
I believe we already have such a theory. It’s called deep ecology, and it is the core belief of the radical environmental movement. The problem is that, in the early stages of this debate, deep ecology was falsely associated with such right wing notions as sealing the borders, applauding AIDS as a population control mechanism, and encouraging Ethiopians to starve. This sent the social ecologists justifiably scurrying to disassociate. And I believe it has muddied the waters of our movement’s attempt to define itself behind a common philosophy.
Calling herself an “unabashed leftist,” Bari went on to explain why “deep ecology is a revolutionary worldview” in contradiction to capitalism, communism, and patriarchy. She rooted this argument in biocentrism, “the belief that nature does not exist to serve humans. Rather, humans are part of nature, one species among many. All species have a right to exist for their own sake, regardless of their usefulness to humans. And biodiversity is a value in itself, essential for the flourishing of both human and nonhuman life.”
Bari fused radical labor analysis with radical ecology. Anyone exposed to Karl Marx will know his basic take on profit: that profit is stolen from the workers when capitalists pay them less than the value of their labor. Bari argued that the same principle of theft applies to ecology, and that profit depends on capitalists taking more from the land than they give back. Although it’s admirable that Marxism and other traditional leftist ideologies believe in equally distributing wealth, Bari wrote, such an approach is a dead end if it fails to recognize that the exploitation of the Earth is where most of that wealth comes from.
As such, Bari believed that “[i]f workers really had control of the factories (and I say this as a former factory worker), they would start by smashing the machines and finding a more humane way to decide what we need and how to produce it.” In Judi Bari’s eyes, the two greatest shortcomings in traditional Marxism were its failure to address ecology and its failure to address patriarchy.
Like the other solidarity-building revolutionary groups I’ve been discussing, Earth First! was targeted and attacked by the FBI. “The fact that we did not recognize [deep ecology] as revolutionary is one of the reasons we were so unprepared for the magnitude of the attack.” Writing in 1995, Bari argued: “If we are to continue, Earth First! and the entire ecology movement must adjust their tactics to the profound changes that are needed to bring society into balance with nature.” They must become, in other words, a real resistance movement, and connect with revolutionary allies. She wrote:
You cannot seriously address the destruction of wilderness without addressing the society that is destroying it. It’s about time for the ecology movement (and I’m not just talking about Earth First! here) to stop considering itself as separate from the social justice movement. The same power that manifests itself as resource extraction in the countryside manifests itself as racism, classism, and human exploitation in the city. The ecology movement must recognize that we are just one front in a long, proud, history of resistance.
A revolutionary ecology movement must also organize among poor and working people. With the exception of the toxics movement and the native land rights movement most U.S. environmentalists are white and privileged. This group is too invested in the system to pose it much of a threat. A revolutionary ideology in the hands of privileged people can indeed bring about some disruption and change in the system. But a revolutionary ideology in the hands of working people can bring that system to a halt. For it is the working people who have their hands on the machinery. And only by stopping the machinery of destruction can we ever hope to stop this madness.
Bari’s arguments here are well-rooted in history. Giving MOVE and the United Farm Workers as examples, authors Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella argue that many of the grassroots environmental organizations of the 1970s and ’80s “were organized by women, people of color, and community members to fight corporate pollution and exploitation. With no patrons, politicians, or corporate sponsors to answer to or offend, grassroots groups—such as that spearheaded by Lois Gibbs to protest the 20,000 tons of chemical waste that sickened her community of Love Canal, New York—adopted a confrontational, no compromise approach and won battles the professionalized mainstream would or could not fight.”180 (I’ll return to the United Farm Workers in chapter 12: Campaigns & Strategy.)
Judi Bari argued eloquently in her writings for a synthesis of deep ecology, socialism, and feminism. But her arguments through action were even more persuasive. In organizing the 1990 Redwood Summer—a campaign explicitly modeled after the civil rights campaign Mississippi Summer (discussed in chapter 4)—Bari and her colleagues reached out to unite workers, environmentalists, and community members against the common enemy of logging corporations like Maxxam and Pacific Lumber. As a labor organizer, she tried to make forest workers understand that by cooperating with massive clear-cuts and destructive logging they were sacrificing their children’s future livelihoods to make lumber barons rich. And as a radical environmentalist, she tried to convince Earth First! organizers to undertake serious, long-term community organizing.
Bari believed that the very “masculine” approach of early Earth First!—its primary practice being a handful of brave men going out to confront ecocide alone—would not attain victory in the long term. She wanted to see community actions that used a diversity of nonviolent tactics, while simultaneously advancing what she saw as feminist forms of environmental direct action. Bari wrote:
Redwood Summer was the feminization of Earth First!, with 3/4 of the leadership made up of women. Our past actions in the redwood region had drawn no more than 150 participants. But 3,000 people came to Redwood Summer, blocking logging operations and marching through timber towns in demonstrations reminiscent of those against racism in the South. And despite incredible tension and provocation . . . Earth First! maintained both our presence and our non-violence throughout the summer.
Being the first women-led action, Redwood Summer has never gotten the respect it deserves from the old guard of Earth First! But it has profoundly affected the movement in the redwood region. It brought national and international attention to the slaughter of the redwoods. The 2,000-year-old trees of Headwaters Forest, identified, named and made an issue of by Earth First!, are now being preserved largely due to our actions. The legacy of our principled and non-violent stand in Redwood Summer has gained us respect in our communities, and allowed us to continue and build our local movement.181
The effective organizing of Redwood Summer made it a threat even before it succeeded. In May of 1990, Judi Bari and her organizing partner Darryl Cherney were car bombed and severely injured. The car bomb was placed directly underneath Bari’s seat, and she struggled with serious health problems until she died in 2002. Everything we know suggests that the bombing took place with the direct involvement of the FBI (a story I’ll come back to in chapter 9: Counterintelligence & Repression.)
Building coalitions makes you dangerous. It is no coincidence that many of the people I cited in this passage were killed. I don’t want you to take away the message that building bridges between movements will get you put in prison, drugged, shot, or blown up. But being effective brings down repression—you can judge how much those in power are afraid of real coalitions by how violently they repress them.
Such alliances are rare, which is exactly why we have to nurture and protect them when they do arise. Among young and enthusiastic moderates I sometimes see a well-meaning but naïve “can’t we all just get along?” attitude that ignores both the complicated and hazardous nature of power dynamics in a genuinely diverse movement, and the vicious attacks such a movement will face even when it is working smoothly. And among radicals I too often see a contempt toward organizing with others that makes militants easy to isolate and pick off.
Building diverse coalitions requires the difficult and time-consuming work of finding or building common ground. It requires more socially powerful members of the coalition to take stock of their privilege and rid themselves of destructive behavior patterns. It requires that space be deliberately made for people who are underrepresented in decision-making. And it requires that coalitions organize like resistance movements to build the necessary security, strategy, and counter-intelligence that will allow them to survive and thrive. (I’ll come back to coalitions in chapter 12.)
An intersectional approach can help us greatly. Intersectionality—a term coined by civil rights advocate and scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw—is not just a way of understanding how different kinds of oppression can overlap and reinforce each other—it’s also a way of understanding how different marginalized groups can understand common oppressions and find common ground.
In the 1980s in the UK, coal miners went on a years-long strike as part of a prolonged battle between the miners and Margaret Thatcher’s antiunion policies. At the same time as those strikes were dragging on—and coal-mining communities falling into poverty and deprivation—queer organizers were struggling for status and recognition for LGBTQ+ people.
In 1984, a young gay (and communist) organizer in London named Mark Ashton saw a connection between the police beatings of striking miners and of queer people. He saw a common enemy, as he explained to his comrades: “Mining communities are being bullied like we are, being harassed by the police, just as we are. One community should give solidarity to another.”182
Ashton and his comrades formed a group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Together they canvassed the streets of London and held events to raise money for the striking miners. They assembled shipments of food, money, and supplies. When they reached out to mining communities as a group of lesbians and gays, the response from the miners was, at first, mixed.
Indeed, those in power did their best to drive the two movements apart. Rupert Murdoch’s paper The Sun published a front-page story with the headline “Pits and perverts!” (referencing the coal-mining pits).
These divide-and-rule attempts could have worked—but in this case divide and conquer failed because both queer organizers and people in the mining community worked tirelessly to build bridges between the movements. And they were able to overcome stereotypes and homophobic bias through working side by side. (These events were later dramatized in the 2014 film Pride, which is well worth watching.)
At a huge fundraising concert in London, a mining organizer addressed the mostly queer audience of 1500 people: “You know what harassment means, as we do. Now we will pin your badge on us—we will support you. It won’t change overnight, but now 140,000 miners know that there are other causes and other problems. We know about Blacks and gays and nuclear disarmament, and will never be the same.”183
The striking miners did not have the decisive win they hoped for. But when the time came for miners to return the gesture of solidarity, they followed through on their promise. They sent busloads and busloads of miners to march in gay pride parades, they endorsed gay and lesbian equality and pushed resolutions through the Labour Party.
And together they won—within a matter of years they won huge legal gains for gay and lesbian people, and created a cross-movement solidarity that the government and the right-wing media could not break.
A TUG-OF-WAR
Judi Bari is inspiring, and the Wobblies’ idea of “One Big Union” is powerful. But in the short-term, I see little hope of uniting all of those seeking social and ecological justice into a single organization.
When there is a clear common enemy and immediate threat, coalitions are easier to hold together. But once the immediate threat has passed, the coalition often collapses, and underlying arguments reemerge.
That doesn’t always happen. Sometimes common ground is built along the way, especially when there are people with experience and well-rounded analysis. (Indeed, such “bridge builders” are key ingredients for successful coalitions, as I’ll come back to in chapter 12.) But attempts to form a unified organization so often break down over arguments of priority and tactics.
Given the profound difficulty of forming unified organizations, and the strongly unified forces of empire and capitalism arrayed against us, how can we build diverse movements that exert force instead of squabbling internally?
One way is to think of struggle like a tug-of-war. To win we don’t have to be in the same organization, but we have to be on the same side, pulling in the same general direction. At the very least, we should not be pulling against each other. And when an opportunity to make actual progress arises, we have to be coordinated enough to heave all together, and jerk the opposing side down on their faces.
Rather than a rope, we pull with a chain. Each link on that chain is an organization, or a group, or an affiliation. Not everyone on the chain has to agree with each other or even like each other. But if there is enough overlap—enough cross-linkages in the movement—we can still pull very hard in the same general direction despite those differences.
Those in power are pulling very hard in one direction: toward the concentration of power, toward war, toward the stripping of the land for the sake of short-term production and profit. And they have been doing this for a long time. They have used the blunt baton of the police, the promise of wealth, and many sedating ideologies. The end point is what it always has been—an authoritarian future on a ruined and dying planet. Let’s just keep things simple and call it a fascist dystopia. (Figure 3-5.)
Figure 3-5: A tug of war for the future of the planet
On the other side are those pulling for a livable future (or rather, diverse futures). They are the counterforce to those in power, and there have been times—like the Poor People’s Campaign or the Green Corn Rebellion—when farmers and workers and Indigenous people and the poor have been all heaving together.
The goal of programs like COINTELPRO have been to cut the chain, to break those links. And at the same time as they have weakened our side, they have strengthened theirs with a growing industrial economy that pillages the planet while generating both the bribes of cheap consumer goods and the weapons of modern-day warfare. (Figure 3-6). The forces for justice have become divided and distracted. Meanwhile, those in power have terrible new technologies to aid their rule.
Figure 3-6: Division and Distraction
Our job is to rebuild our links by taking action together. To build organizations and coalitions that can connect people. To build strong links we can use to change the course of our future. To build solidarity and cooperation. (Figure 3-7.)
Figure 3-7: Solidarity and Cooperation
At the same time we must break up the systems that allow those in power to exert force. We must do our best to sever the physical, economic, and political links that put them in control. Some of those are social and psychological, but many are physical infrastructure.
We need both kinds of action—cooperation and disruption—to win a livable future.
PRACTICALITIES OF FULL SPECTRUM RESISTANCE
For clarity, let me summarize the argument I’ve been making in this chapter. A movement using full spectrum resistance will do the following:
- Use a diversity of tactics (especially within campaigns and movements), build an understanding of how and why militancy is important, and cultivate cooperation among people using different tactics.
- Develop cooperation among different “constituencies” and across traditional barriers (including ethnic lines, militants and moderates, aboveground and underground), including through alliances and coalitions.
- Uphold solidarity.
- Use intersectionality and synthesis of ideas from different struggles for justice (like “revolutionary ecology”).
Above all, full spectrum resistance means countering the “divide and conquer” tactics used by those in power. These things look simple on the page. In practical terms, they are extremely difficult. And they run counter to many activist subcultures and identities. There are, however, some straightforward habits that can help us to build full spectrum resistance and encourage everyone to get along:
Don’t tell other people to slow down, especially if they are more directly affected by a problem than you. It’s okay if you don’t want to use confrontational tactics—but don’t tell other people not to use tactics just because you are unable or unwilling to use them yourself.
Martin Luther King Jr. argued that people who break this rule were basically worse than the KKK: “Apart from bigots and backlashers, it seems to be a malady even among those whites who like to regard themselves as ‘enlightened.’ I would especially refer to those who counsel, ‘Wait!’ and to those who say that they sympathize with our goals but cannot condone our methods of direct-action pursuit of those goals. I wonder at men who dare to feel that they have some paternalistic right to set the timetable for another man’s liberation. Over the past several years, I must say, I have been gravely disappointed with such white ‘moderates.’ I am often inclined to think that they are more of a stumbling block to the Negro’s progress than the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner.”184
You can have strategic dialogue with allies without telling them to dilute their tactics. But if that dialogue is going to be meaningful it can’t be paternalistic, and it can’t be based on thin excuses for inaction. I suggest it is better to encourage action you like with your allies (by supporting or participating in it), rather than suppressing or discouraging the action of other people. Resistance movements are only able to escalate when people encourage (literally, “put heart into”) other people to take on more militancy and commitment. Closely related advice:
Respect the autonomy of other groups. If one of your movement allies is already running a campaign or an action, don’t just barge in and take over or flagrantly violate their “rules of engagement.” I know a militant group in a big city that was recently working to organize a big rally while inviting labor union involvement. Labor hemmed and hawed for a while and then announced that they would—by complete coincidence—be holding their own rally at the same time and at the same location. They would be bringing a very large crowd and their elaborate sound system, but if the militant group wanted to have a couple of guest speakers that would be fine if the union approved them in advance.
Do I really need to say that is not okay?
Conflict is more likely to arise when a preexisting “claim” is not clear-cut. A few years ago I went to a protest against a fundraiser for the ruling Conservative party. A government minister would be speaking. A number of different groups showed up to protest. Some of the radicals wanted to block cars arriving at the fundraiser. But when they did this, some liberals present objected and told the radicals not to block cars, creating an unnecessary (and inappropriate) tactical argument in front of the police. (The liberals did this even though, a few months earlier, they had participated in a related campaign against the same government, which had resorted to civil disobedience and blockades after the government had made it very clear that they would never listen to reason.)
Here is one simple test to help resolve such conflicts: did your group call the protest, the time, and the place? Or are you responding directly to some act by those in power? In the case above, everyone present was there to protest a government fundraiser at a place and time set by the government. The liberals didn’t create the event, they were just responding, and so it wasn’t up to them to set the rules of engagement. They simply felt entitled to do so because they were middle-class liberals and because there were a lot of them.
Of course, radicals in Black blocs sometimes do show up at marches that other people have called and organized, in order to use militant tactics like property destruction. This is what Starhawk and others were complaining about in the letter we already discussed. If, for example, there is an international summit in town then many different actions may be happening at the same time using different rules, separation of time and place help (we’ll return to that in a few pages). But if militants want to build movement strength and support for a diversity of tactics, then showing up at an action someone else has organized specifically to break their rules of engagement is not a good way to do it.
Respecting autonomy also requires that we consider who is most directly affected by inequality and repression. Imagine I’m coordinating an Indigenous solidarity campaign over a land dispute, and some social justice “expert” from the Catholic Church comes to me and tells the organizers to use less militant tactics. I’m going to tell them to go to buzz off, because the Church bears a heavy burden of guilt for stealing the land of Indigenous people and has no business telling anyone how to fight. On the other hand, if an Indigenous person from the disputed land comes to us and asks us to use less militant tactics, I’m going to listen carefully and seriously to what they have to say.185
Build a radical bloc to get influence and advocate for action. The conflict about blocking cars at the Conservative fundraiser didn’t just happen because of an argument about autonomy and turf. It happened because a lot of the militants showed up late and weren’t organized as a group. So by the time they started to block vehicles, a number of cars had already driven through. A precedent had been set. As a result, the liberals were surprised, probably a bit frightened, and reacted reflexively to try to reassert the status quo.
Here’s how it could have gone smoothly: the militants show up early in a group of five or ten, which is plenty to block a lane of traffic. Perhaps they have a couple of chants or signs ready, or a token item to block the road like an empty barrel. As soon as enough people are present to do it safely, they start blocking incoming vehicles. As new people show up to the protest, they see right away that blocking cars is the thing to do. And if anyone has concerns, the militants deescalate potential arguments and explain their position in straightforward terms: “We’re blocking cars to interfere with a Conservative fundraiser, because the government uses the money raised there to whip up hate against immigrants and to push the criminalization of poor people.”
Many tactical disagreements could be smoothed out if radicals at an action or in a campaign joined together as a bloc, organized and showed up early, explained their actions simply and in advance, and tried to calm anyone who got scared or upset by more militant tactics. Liberal groups are well-organized and well-funded. As radicals, we often need better organization to counter the tactical monoculture those groups impose, and a bloc or affinity group is a good way to do this on a small scale.
Fight oppression and gain strength internally, while building coalitions and alliances externally. You can’t have an effective resistance organization, radical or otherwise, if it is racked internally by oppression or bad group dynamics. There must be a strong basis for unity, at least on short-term and intermediate goals. Set aside some time in your group to discuss your purpose, ways of making your group appropriately inclusive, and to learn and develop your anti-oppressive analysis and practice. Prioritize the voices of people who have been marginalized or underrepresented in your decision-making and strategy development.
That doesn’t mean everyone has to agree that everything is perfect before undertaking action. That would stall any action and probably collapse the group, something I’ve seen many times.
To the contrary, you have to show people that an organization can achieve success through action. If a movement can’t win any victories, why would people bother to stick with it through the slow and difficult work of fighting oppression and building good dynamics?186
Identify a common enemy and a common struggle. Building resistance is extremely difficult when regular people identify with those in power instead of with each other. As John Steinbeck argued: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In other words, too many people falsely believed that they would one day be at the top of the pyramid. In Nazi Germany, as I discussed, that identification with power hampered serious resistance even after the Nazis were gone. When China was occupied by Japan, Chinese revolutionaries used that common external enemy to build cooperation across the political spectrum from communists to right-wing nationalists. A shared hostility toward those in power has held successful revolutions together throughout history.187
This was instrumental in the alliance of lesbian and gay organizers with miners in the UK in the 1980s.
It is a common enemy that will allow people to bridge their ideological and cultural gaps to fight side by side. And the more imminent the threat they face, the more people will be willing to break old habits and set their differences and conflicts aside.
Don’t publicly attack allies—deal with conflicts in confidence (with one exception). Malcolm X argued: “Instead of airing our differences in public, we have to realize we’re all the same family. And when you have a family squabble, you don’t get out on the sidewalk.”188 Longtime forest defense organizer Zoe Blunt told me that—through hard-won experience—it is a principle of her coalition organizing that coalition members don’t make public criticisms of each other.
People in successful and serious struggles have often followed this principle even when they have very different tactics. In the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, even a prominent pacifist like Archbishop Desmond Tutu refused to condemn armed resisters.189
This is not just a matter of courtesy to comrades—it keeps our movements strong in the face of divide-and-conquer repression. Mohawk Shawn Brant of Tyendinaga told me about Indigenous opposition to a new tax in Ontario a few years ago. Indigenous militants allied themselves with the more official Chiefs of Ontario. According to Brant, the government told the Chiefs: “We can talk if you aren’t associated with bad Indians.” But the Chiefs refused to back down and break solidarity, and the government quickly capitulated.
Avoiding public attacks can be an important expression of solidarity. But there must actually be mechanisms for resolving conflict internally, such as third-party mediators, and they must be taken seriously. Otherwise dangerous conflicts or legitimate grievances might only be suppressed to bubble up later in more damaging ways. I’ve seen this happen too many times, and it’s often heartbreaking.
While it’s generally good to avoid airing grievances publicly, there is a very important exception to that guideline: when we confront patterns of sexist, racist, or otherwise oppressive behavior.
Too often we have seen groups overlook the internal mistreatment of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people. Too often, abusers have been ignored or enabled because of their status or positions. Too often we have heard things like: “We don’t want to lose that man, he’s a good organizer” or “Just ignore that, it’s for the good of the movement.”
That’s bullshit. Solidarity does not mean papering over nasty behavior. Solidarity means siding with the people who are not in a position of power. And it means that people of privilege may have to be uncomfortable and deal with uncomfortable situations.
To overlook racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other oppressions does not make our movements stronger. It makes them weaker, and more fragmented. Every time a nasty man like Brandon Darby (see chapter 6) is protected because he is a “good organizer,” a movement will lose five or ten potential organizers who are women or people of color. How many incredible women did the Black Panthers lose because of rampant sexism and misogyny?
Conversely, how many fantastic organizers were Judi Bari and Fred Hampton able to recruit and retain by taking an inclusive and intersectional approach?
That doesn’t mean every single inappropriate remark needs to be responded to with an open letter of condemnation. There are a variety of options to handle thoughtless or insensitive behavior, many of which can happen within particular groups. (We’ll come back to this subject in chapter 6: Security and Safety.)
But patterns of abuse, sexual harassment, or other kinds of oppressive aggression must be confronted openly within our movements.
Avoid bringing repression down on your allies. During the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, some of the “peaceful protesters” took it upon themselves to detain people who smashed windows, so that the window-smashers could be turned in to police. This is a classic illustration of liberals falling for the divide-and-conquer trap and breaking solidarity.
Of course, militants have brought down repression on their allies, too, often inadvertently. The Weather organization’s battle with police at the Chicago Days of Rage in 1969 (which Fred Hampton dismissed as “Custeristic”) was followed by violent police raids on Black communities in the area. We know that occupiers throughout history have used mass punishment and violent reprisals against civilians to try to discourage resistance. We expect that and it’s one of the reasons we fight. But militants have to make sure they accomplish something if they risk triggering reprisals—the Chicago fights with police didn’t accomplish much of anything.
I also think militants have an obligation to try to take action in a way that will minimize reprisals on others.
More generally, this principle also means that activists in general should follow security culture and refuse to give information to the police, since almost any information can be used against our movement.
One of the concerns that Starhawk’s letter raised was that Black bloc types would anonymously smash a bunch of windows during a protest, and then run away, leaving less mobile and nonclandestine people behind to deal with police repression. This is a legitimate moral concern. It’s also a tactical concern, since if a person wants to smash a corporate store window, then the worst possible time to get away with it is when already surrounded by police. If you are going to use a mix of low-risk and highrisk tactics at a single action you have to do so carefully. There is actually a military principle we can learn from: combined arms.
Coordinate different tactics and groups as “combined arms.” Ancient Greeks like the Athenians used armies that were mostly composed of one kind of fighter—a hoplite armed with shield and spear. Later armies, like those under Philip II of Macedon, adopted a mix of units fighting in the same army: infantry, cavalry, missile troops like archers, and large siege engines like catapults.
This diverse combination of fighters was devastatingly effective, because it meant that the Macedonians almost always had the appropriate fighters to attack the weak points of any given enemy. At the same time, their heterogeneous composition meant that their army as a whole had very few weak points, since each unit compensated for the weaknesses of the others.
Combined arms are only effective when coordinated and complementary. In World War II, the Allies pushed the Nazis out of occupied countries through the combined used of infantry, tanks, artillery, and air support. But if through confusion, artillery or bombers attacked the same area that infantry was fighting in, the result could be mass injury and death of allied soldiers.
If you were an army commander, you would not fire artillery on to a spot where your own infantry were present, because you could easily blow them all up.190
Militants, then, may want to avoid violence or police confrontation among “noncombatants” or “peaceful protesters” for the same reason that artillery does not fire on allied infantry—artillery shells are too explosive and dangerous to be used in close proximity to allies unable to shield themselves from it.
There’s a set of modern protest guidelines called the “St. Paul Principles” which call for separation of time and place between different kinds of action for just this reason. By holding militant and nonmilitant events at different times and in different places, we can avoid many of the concerns discussed here.
In this chapter I’ve written about some big-picture dynamics of movements. These can help us to understand very generally why some movements win, why they lose, why they fracture, and how we can get along with allies.
But the day-to-day success of a resistance movement rests on the specifics. How do you recruit the people you need and keep them? How do you organize into groups that can cooperate and get things done? How do you moderate internal conflict? How do you reach out to new allies and supporters? How do you protect yourselves and your comrades from repression? How do you gather the intelligence you need to choose good targets? How do you work out the strategy and tactics you need to mobilize force in a rapidly changing political conflict? And how have movements of the past done these things?
I will continue to talk about the big picture and flesh out the ideas and patterns I’ve already discussed. But it is those specifics that I turn to now.