CHAPTER 10
Logistics & Fundraising
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“Amateurs study strategy. Professionals study logistics.”
—Military saying

VIETNAMESE LOGISTICS

Vietnam, 1966. The people of Vietnam have been fighting foreign invaders for two thousand years, since the Trung sisters mobilized an army to drive back a Chinese invasion in the year 40 CE. But by 1966 Vietnam has been occupied for a quarter-century, first by the Japanese and then by the French, both of which were defeated and forced to abandon their occupations.

Now it is the Americans who have invaded and occupied the southern portion of the country. Their military might is colossal and represents far more firepower than all past invaders combined. With a constant influx of planes, helicopters, aircraft carriers, missiles, and bombers, they appear almost invincible. The Americans have vast military infrastructure, with enormous ships, airfields, and city-sized bases.

All this infrastructure, all these forces, must be kept supplied. Within a year of the invasion an immense logistical trail stretches from the United States to its bases within Vietnam. Each month, 770,000 tons of supplies are brought in to supply the “police action,” and almost 10 percent of that amount is ammunition. The army consumes ten million field rations and thirty million liters of gasoline and oil each month. Each soldier uses more than 150 kilograms of supplies per day, including food, fuel, clothing, and ammo. Big-ticket items like vehicles are also being shipped in and replaced—a plane is lost about once per day.197

If each American soldier consumes 150 kg of supplies each day, then a twelve-man squad consumes 1,800 kg of supplies in a day, or fifty-four thousand tons a month. If you want to visualize this, picture an army jeep loaded down with 350 kg of supplies. To supply the squad, a jeep like this would have to arrive 154 times a month—more than five times a day, light or dark, rain or shine. (If you want to picture the entire American supply flow, picture an endless string of these jeeps driving single file, speeding past you at a rate of almost one per second, twenty-four hours a day.)

Vietnamese guerrillas, on the other hand, are armed with very little. They have a few weapons seized in the past from Japanese or French occupiers. But mostly they must steal arms from the Americans or make their own weapons. They subsist on rice, sometimes with a bit of fish or frog or other protein. Other than food, the average North Vietnamese fighter consumes only a few ounces of supplies each day.198 Their entire force could be supplied several times over with the materiel used by a single American division.199

They don’t have an industrial economy. But they do have the land. And so they dig. Tunnels had been dug to fight the French and the Japanese. The tunnels are expanded and extended. Some of the tunnels are little more than village bomb shelters to protect peasants from napalm and aerial bombardment. These are enlarged and interconnected—whole villages are moved underground. By the end of the war, the village of Vinh Moc is nearly a hundred feet underground. Every time they are bombed, they rebuild and dig deeper and deeper in the thick clay.

The tunnels are most extensive in the area of Cu Chi, northwest of Saigon, less than one hundred kilometers north of the Mekong River Delta. By the end of the war, there will be hundreds of kilometers of tunnels in Cu Chi, some extending right underneath and into American bases. The biggest of the tunnels are large enough to hide water buffalo. The smallest outlying tunnels are only about thirty inches wide by thirty inches high. The ceilings are rounded, the entrances concealed behind disguised trapdoors.200 American soldiers can’t even squeeze into the tunnels with their gear on. Their rifles are so long that once they have entered a narrow tunnel they can’t swing the guns around to point in the opposite direction.

The tunnel networks contain most of the forward infrastructure of the National Liberation Front. They encompass bomb shelters, sleeping chambers, hospitals, kitchens, bathrooms, storerooms and rice caches, theaters, conference rooms, and temporary graveyards. There are armories, forges, and weapons factories.201 In these underground factories, the NLF manufacture the weapons they need to defend their people and the land.

They capture rifles and then reverse-engineer them to manufacture copies by hand. They scrounge and steal whatever they can—they even capture a working tank and bury the whole thing under six feet of soil. It has working batteries and lights, so they use it as an underground command post.202 But mostly they rely on the wasteful American logistics system, on what Americans throw away. The NLF salvage silk from parachutes for improvised gas masks filled with fine charcoal.203 They make their own grenades using tins discarded by American soldiers. To make a grenade they fill a tomato juice tin with explosives, and then put that tin in a larger beer or Coca-Cola can. They fill the space between with road gravel to make shrapnel.204

Explosives are the hardest to scrounge. The Americans don’t just leave those lying around—but they do throw tens of thousands of bombs from aircraft every day, raining down onto rice paddies, forests, and villages. Not all of those bombs detonate. Trained observers watch the bombing runs, note where each bomb falls, and mark a map when a bomb fails to explode. A special munitions salvage team is sent out to dismantle the dud, to cut it open with handsaws and gently extract the explosives. They can make many grenades and booby traps with the explosives in one undetonated bomb. But if something goes wrong, there will be nothing left of the salvage team to bury.205

The North Vietnamese don’t have aircraft carriers and satellites, but they have their own ingenuity and relentless hard work. They scavenge everything they can, put every scrap of American garbage into the war effort. Even the bomb craters left by the B-52s, which fill with water in the rainy season, are used as duck or fish ponds, increasing the amount of scarce protein available.

Life in the tunnels is very difficult. There are ventilation shafts, but they are few and carefully hidden. The main trapdoors are all closed during the day, and by midafternoon it feels like the oxygen has all been used up. The people living in the tunnels lie belly-down, with their faces propped in the space between their arms, trying to remain motionless and breathe in a bit of cool air from close to the ground. Extreme humidity causes skin infections and spoils food. Latrine and washing facilities are very poor.

Once the Americans find out about the tunnels they try constantly to destroy them. In the underground hospitals, salvaged parachutes are suspended from the ceiling to stop soil from falling onto patients during surgery when the tunnels are shaken by bombs or tanks overhead. If Americans pass near the tunnel entrances, Vietnamese guerrillas fire on them from hidden sniping holes, or throw grenades at their tanks. If US soldiers try to enter the tunnel, it is the task of the guerrilla to draw them farther in, to lure them deep underground where they will set off improvised mines or stumble into pits filled with sharpened bamboo sticks.

The Americans train special squads to enter the tunnels, they inject poison gas into the entrances, they fill them with fuel and explosives and blow them up. But it doesn’t work. The tunnel networks are too vast and too compartmentalized to be disabled by piecemeal attacks. The Americans come to realize this.

Eventually the American army decides to obliterate the ecology above the tunnels—to make it impossible for the guerrillas to feed themselves and move around aboveground. They spray Agent Orange from thousands of aircraft to kill the vegetation. They bulldoze, burn, and bomb the villages and forests into ash and dust.206 In some places they use helicopters to plant a specially bred “American grass” that burns well. A cloud of B-52 bombers converts Cu Chi into a moonscape.

By 1971, many of the guerrillas are near starvation. The logistical resources of the NLF are strained just to keep people alive, to cope with the military and ecological onslaught. But they need very little to fight.

US troops are well-supplied, and in the end, that’s part of what defeats them. The US supply needs are enormous and endless. Despite their tremendous military superiority—or, perhaps, because of it—the US army is forced to withdraw. They have been bled dry physically, psychologically, economically, and logistically. Vietnam throws out one more occupier.207

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Conflict can be exciting and dramatic, but winners are made by logistics as much as strategy or tactics.

It does not matter what kind of campaign is underway, whether it is an armed underground movement or a strictly nonviolent struggle. Anyone who dedicates their life or time to struggle—no matter what kind—needs to eat, needs a place to sleep, needs to be able to move to areas of conflict, needs certain basic tools and services.

For the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the civil rights struggle, logistical support meant arranging carpools and replacing shoes that had worn out from walking countless miles. For blockades in mass civil disobedience it means ensuring that food is served on blockade lines, that legal and jail support is available for arrestees, that pamphlets and literature are on hand to distribute. For armed resistance movements, it has meant supplying ammunition, concealment, and medical aid. Adequate logistical support can decide whether a movement feels high morale or crushing despair. It determines whether a resistance force can fight on a sustained basis or whether a burst of early enthusiasm is crushed by the hardships of prolonged political conflict.

Logistics

In everyday conversation, people use “logistics” to mean, vaguely, any little details. But its more formal meaning is specific. Logistics involves moving people and stuff and providing people with the supplies, equipment, and services they need. Sometimes it’s divided into “movement, materiel, and maintenance.”

The US Department of Defense uses the term “logistics” to mean: “Planning and executing the movement and support of forces. It includes those aspects of military operations that deal with: a. design and development, acquisition, storage, movement, distribution, maintenance, evacuation, and disposition of materiel; b. movement, evacuation, and hospitalization of personnel; c. acquisition or construction, maintenance, operation, and disposition of facilities; and d. acquisition or furnishing of services.”

Military writer P. D. Foxton observed that logistics are often overlooked during quiet times: “They emerge during war because war is very much fact. They disappear in peace, because in peace, war is mostly theory.”208 He might well have been writing about resistance groups or about any serious activist campaign. In my experience and many, if not most, of the cases I have researched, inadequate logistics are the major hurdle to campaign escalation. People in the Occupy movement quickly discovered the logistical challenges of setting up smoothly running encampments for more than a few days. Any major action brings logistical challenges.

When I started to research this subject, I found surprisingly few resources about logistics for resistance movements. There were a handful of search hits and some discussion in military manuals, but shockingly little compared to writings on tactics, strategy, and other more dramatic subjects. One reason became clear to me when I came across this paragraph in a book about the 1950s Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. Muthoni Likimani writes:

Mau Mau was a top secret movement of people who went to war with nothing—no guns, no spears . . . nothing but determination to get freedom and their land. What upsets me is that of all the books written about the movement, as much as women were involved, no one has ever written about the extent of their involvement. To me, women were unsung warriors. They were the fighters that no one talks about. They went to the forest with other men. They were seeing that the people in the forest were fed, that the sick were taken care of. Women raised money, stole guns, stole medicine, transported all kinds of goods into the forest, they were even shooting.209

Terisa Turner adds: “Women . . . provided intelligence, runners, food, refuge, medical supplies and care” while others carried messages and provided arms and safe houses.210 Too many historians of too many resistance movements mention women only in asides. They ignore the fact that without (mostly unmentioned) women doing logistical work, the men those historians focus on would be unarmed, hungry, without medical care, unable to find the enemy, and probably naked.

The logistical underpinnings of a resistance movement are too often overlooked as unglamorous “women’s work.” Logistics may not be spectacular, but they are still essential, and we ignore them at our peril. Consider the words of Iulia, who argues that sexism among Greek anarchists during the 2008 uprisings showed in a tendency to glorify violent or “masculine” activities, while excluding those that are traditionally “feminine.” She says: “As for valuing masculine labor over feminine labor, we lack the organization in which the importance of feminine labor becomes obvious. The heroic acts are more important; that’s the only narrative we have, and so the feminine labor is not valued. I think that’s why we don’t have many squats in Greece, because it requires organization.”211

Of course, there’s another reason we may not talk about logistics. Those of us in globally affluent aboveground movements have outsourced our logistical needs such that we may not think of them. If we need fliers for an action, we don’t need to set up a mimeograph machine in a hidden room; we can head down to Staples and photocopy them. If we need food, we don’t have to smuggle sacks of rice through underground tunnels; we go to the grocery store. If we need to visit distant comrades for a meeting, we don’t walk for weeks along hidden jungle paths; we get on the bus or drive.

These things cost money, and so for many movements meeting logistical needs is ultimately about fundraising. This is crucial, but comes with its own set of risks and benefits. And so fundraising is what I’ll start with.

THE NONPROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

I’m looking at an old photo of renowned organizer Saul Alinsky sitting in his office. On the blackboard behind him are the words: “Low Overhead=High Independence.”

Organizations need money, and large, professionalized organizations need a lot of it. Every source of money comes with its own challenges. Grassroots fundraising is hard, but large donations from private sources often have strings attached. Which is the focus of an excellent anthology, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex from INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence.

In her contribution to that anthology, Andrea Smith tells how, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the “multimillionaire robber barons” of the United States (like the Rockefellers and Carnegies) made vast fortunes by exploiting “natural resources” and human beings. To protect their earnings they turned, ironically, to philanthropy. By transferring some of their wealth to charitable foundations, they could protect their wealth from taxation.

But faced with a growing labour movement, and flourishing political radicalism in general, the robber barons found a second purpose for their foundations: to undermine radical organizations in favor of pro-capitalist charity. This meant, for example, they might donate to a charity giving handouts to unemployed workers, while simultaneously hiring Pinkertons and strike-breakers to use against the labour radicals.

“The rationale behind this strategy was that while individual workers deserved social relief,” explains Smith, “organized workers in the form of unions were a threat to society.” By choosing who was funded and who wasn’t, these foundations could manipulate or suppress social movements. This would apply to the civil rights movement, too, as Robert L. Allen wrote in his 1969 book Black Awakening in Capitalist America. He explains:

The simple but unfortunate fact is that the militants are usually less well organized than the Urban League, the NAACP, [the Southern Christian Leadership Conference], preachers, teachers, and social workers who are invited to participate in the [struggle for Black liberation]. Consequently, it is relatively easy for representatives of the privileged Black bourgeoisie to take control of organizations ostensibly dedicated to militant reform, to enabling Black people to assume control over their own lives. If this process of takeover goes unchecked, the united front is transformed into an instrumentality serving the interests of the Black middle class alone. The needs of the popular Black masses go by the board, and a new oppressive elite assumes power.212

Allen cites particular grants, fellowships, and leadership programs that were designed to recruit specific organizers and co-opt key organizations.213 He points to the Congress of Racial Equality as a target for co-optation, arguing that it was made vulnerable by high expenditures and overhead. Its position in the middle—“militant rhetoric but ambiguous and reformist definition of Black power . . . appealed to Foundation officials who were seeking just those qualities in a Black organization which hopefully could tame the ghettos. From the Foundation’s point of view, old-style moderate leaders no longer exercised any real control, while genuine Black radicals were too dangerous.”214

As always, those in power tried to split movements into manageable parts. Some of those parts were managed with the carrot through financial incentives, fellowships, and promises of political connections. Other parts of the movement and other people—people like Fred Hampton or Anna Mae Aquash—could not be co-opted. So they were managed with the stick, and with the police pistol, and with the old standbys of poverty and economic exploitation.215

The “charitable” foundations of the capitalist elite used a similar approach overseas, Christine E. Ahn and Mark Dowie argue. The Rockefeller Foundation was a major backer of that mass social and agricultural re-engineering known as the Green Revolution. Afraid that hunger in the “third world” would provoke communist revolutions, the Rockefellers funded massive projects to intensify and industrialize agriculture around the world.216 As a means of reducing hunger it was a dramatic failure; about one million people globally were hungry at the start of the Green Revolution, a number that ballooned to 800 million by the time it was over.217 (An unsurprising consequence of replacing countless stable and locally adapted food systems with monocultures.) It was, however, very successful at making people dependent on industrial capitalist economies.218

The system of foundation funding has influenced and railroaded social movements for a century. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is full of stories of funders—subtly or not-so-subtly—encouraging organizers to take on less radical, less controversial political stances in exchange for funding. This exacerbates a split between different movement wings. On one hand are the mostly liberal nonprofits, well-organized and professionalized, with relatively large budgets for communications and outreach, and with mostly reform-oriented goals. On the other hand are the grassroots activists and the radical groups, loosely organized and poorly funded, working and organizing on what funds they can scrape together. Plenty of radical people work in nonprofits, of course, but often can’t say what they truly believe out of fear of losing their funding.

This system is dangerous in part because it can function to draw the most promising or capable organizers away from their own communities and funnel them off into a better-paying—and less threatening—career path. This doesn’t just happen in the affluent parts of the world. A friend told me about communities in Mexico where doing really radical action when young is part of a career trajectory—it’s how activists “show their chops” to illustrate that they’re worth buying off.219

Dylan Rodríguez speaks to this idea directly, arguing that the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) “contributes to a mode of organizing that is ultimately unsustainable. To radically change society, we must build mass movements that can topple systems of domination, such as capitalism. However, the NPIC encourages us to think of social justice organizing as a career; that is, you do the work if you can get paid for it. However, a mass movement requires the involvement of millions of people, most of whom cannot get paid. By trying to do grassroots organizing through this careerist model, we are essentially asking a few people to work more than full-time to make up for the work that needs to be done by millions.”220

They also warn of the hazards of grant funding in general, and how it can hamper cooperation by forcing social justice organizations to compete with one another. The strategic effects are serious as well; instead of deciding what they think is the most important action to take, or what will be the most valuable to their communities, social justice organizations may rewrite their goals to fit what they think will get funded.

So what to do? Should all radical organizations refuse foundation grants? There are many different answers. Strong and diverse social movements have room for different kinds of organizations. Liberal, educational nonprofits have an important role to play in raising awareness, among other things. Christine E. Ahn writes: “I do not argue that social justice organizations should not take foundation grants—in fact, they should, particularly to fund think tanks and other rigorous intellectual engagement with political issues and policy debates. But it is critical that social justice organizations abandon any notion that foundations are not established for a donor’s private gain.”221

We cannot expect all groups and organizations to match our own needs for orthodoxy. Well-funded organizations can do important work in social movements. Grassroots funding is always harder to gather; if big organizations are doing awareness-raising for some issue, then radicals can be freed up to focus on building communities of resistance and on taking action. (Which is what a lot of us would rather be doing, anyway.)

Another answer is that radical groups—resistance movements in general—need to develop their own grassroots sources of funding. This is not necessarily popular, as Stephanie Guilloud and William Cordery explain in their essay “Fundraising Is Not a Dirty Word.”

Guilloud and Cordery write: “When you convene organizers, nonprofit staff members and activists together, fundraising is rarely the center of passionate debate. Though an important component of most organizing efforts in the United States, fundraising is usually perceived by activists as our nasty compromise within an evil capitalist structure. As long as we relegate fundraising to a dirty chore better handled by grant writers and development directors than organizers, we miss an opportunity to create stepping-stones toward community-based economies.”222 Community fundraising has benefits beyond the cash, they argue: “Grassroots fundraising is a strategy to maintain a firm connection to our base and to initiate community-based economic structures.”223

So where do radical movements get money? And how do they get it in a way that ensures the integrity of both their morals and their pocketbooks?

FUNDING RESISTANCE GROUPS

In the recruitment chapter, I wrote about resistance movements as a set of concentric circles (See Figure 10-1). A mass base of sympathizers supports the movement from a distance. Auxiliaries help directly (but occasionally) with organizing, while cadres, leaders, and combatants form the most dedicated core of the movement. Recruiters aim to move people inward, from distant moral supporters to active members.

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Figure 10-1: Resistance movement parts as concentric circles

Fundraising works the same way. You start with an uninvolved outer group, initiate a relationship with them, and ask them to support your movement. As time goes on, you build that relationship, and encourage people to make larger and more regular contributions.

Joan Flanagan, in her book Successful Fundraising: A Complete Handbook for Volunteers and Professionals uses a pyramid to show the kinds of donations individuals make. (See Figure 10-2. I’ve modified the labels slightly to better match the terminology I’m using here.)

Flanagan explains: “The bottom layer represents the most people. They will give the least amount of money, have the least commitment to the organization, and take the least time to cultivate. The top of the pyramid has the fewest people, who give the most money, are the most committed to the mission of the group, and need the most time to cultivate. There is a direct relationship between time and money: the more money, the more time it takes to get. So start now.”224 That progress starts at the bottom of the pyramid.

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Figure 10-2: Fundraising Pyramid for Individual Gifts

She writes: “The first donations to your organization may come from sales, special events, or fees for service. These are the easiest transactions, because donors get something tangible in return. You are asking for the smallest amounts of money, and this takes the least time.”225 But over time, you encourage people to move up the fundraising pyramid so that a smaller number become bigger donors. “Build the base of small gifts first. Eighty to 90 percent of planned gifts and major gifts come from people who have been members or annual donors for three to five years.”226

Building that base is important and—as much as radicals dislike asking for money—fundraising has a lot in common with community outreach. Talking to strangers or neighbors about radical issues is not necessarily easy, but it is important, and it’s a capacity that radicals need to develop.

To learn more about fundraising for radicals, I sat down with Harry Pilfold. Harry is a professional fundraiser who works with environment NGOs to develop and coordinate door-to-door fundraising campaigns. He’s also a longtime radical and activist—the perfect person to give advice on fundraising for revolutionaries.

Harry tells me that his first months as a new canvasser were very challenging. But a few difficult months in, something changed. He had a breakthrough. Now he says: “It’s the best job of my life.” Harry is confident, his speech animated. He’s full of anecdotes; a skilled fundraiser, ready to make a good first impression and build rapport. Which is important, because he has spent a lot of his time knocking on strangers’ doors.

We activists—and radicals in particular—often work in a bubble, interacting mostly with people with similar politics. That’s a promising social pool for fundraising in that we may have strong connections and know people who share our commitment to a cause. But it’s usually a very small pool, and one that we must consider reaching beyond to fund effective organizations. And that means asking for funds from people who aren’t 100 percent ideological matches.

And that’s okay. The reasons that people give money, Harry explains, are as much emotional as they are intellectual. Success requires solid ideas as part of an emotionally moving pitch. Effective fundraisers believe in the importance of their work.

Harry tells me about running into one canvasser who was not at all familiar with environmental issues, and had been telling people an organization would help save “the whales of the Great Lakes.” Which, obviously, don’t exist, and almost everyone knows it. But that canvasser was successful because of her confidence, because she really believed in raising money for environmental causes.

There are a few key reasons that people give money, Harry tells me:

So how do you get good at making that initial connection, at asking people for money?

Learn to approach people, and practice. How you approach people will determine your success, especially with strangers or people outside your immediate political community.

When someone answers the door, Harry introduces himself and gets right into his pitch. Don’t ask questions, he advises, not even “How are you?” or “Have you heard of our group?” Questions are an invitation to say “no.”

Appear confident, friendly, and enthusiastic. Make eye contact and smile. Ms. Magazine warns against “begging, apologizing, or demanding” when asking for money. They write: “Funders need to be convinced that you believe in the project, and that their participation would not be charity or an obligation, but, yes, a privilege.”227

Fundraiser Dorie Wilsnack advises you to remember “that people who contribute to your work do so because you are doing them a favor, not vice versa. You are out there holding the rallies and press conferences and distributing the literature for something that they deeply believe in but don’t have the time or inclination to work on actively.”228

Credibility and appearance are important in making a first impression. Having a bank account, the ability to accept checks, and numbered receipts are all helpful. (People donate larger amounts if you can take checks or credit cards, even if they are donating with cash, because you seem more credible.) Credibility also means that your appearance, your approach, and your materials should match.229

Talk about the good work your organization does, but don’t get diverted into details of the issue unless people are specifically curious (or want to test you). Having a pamphlet or materials to hand them at the very end is fine, but if you give someone anything bigger than a postcard it can be a conversation-ender. People will often use that as an excuse to defer action: “Let me read this first.” It’s better to give literature or a website only to finish the conversation.

At some point, once you’ve established a connection, you do have to ask for money. (Harry tells me about canvassers who never mention money until the very end, almost as an afterthought.) Name a specific amount that you are asking for. Make giving as simple as possible. While some organizations will offer a bracket of donation choices (low, medium and high), whenever you force people to choose among options you introduce an obstacle.230 Better to ask for the specific amount you need, and let them know that anything they give (higher or lower) is appreciated.

Dorie Wilsnack notes: “The more specific you are about what the money is for, the more likely that people who support your cause will give. If your cause seems vague and not well organized, they will be less likely to contribute. Be clear with people on whether the money is going to support the group, or you, or both.”231

You do have to practice this to get good at it. Especially for radicals and anti-capitalists, asking for money can be really uncomfortable and counterintuitive. But we still live in a money-based society. Some of us need to learn to ask people for money—and get really good at it—if we want our movements to grow and flourish. As Joan Flanagan writes: “You are not serving your organization by waiting for money to come in and surrender. To guarantee a dependable income, you need to ask for money and ask your volunteers to ask for money.”232 Harry suggests canvassing as often as possible for practice, and that getting a part-time job fundraising for a community nonprofit is a great way to get paid training and experience.233

What makes a good canvasser? Not everyone is emotionally suited to being a canvasser, in part because of the need to deal with frequent rejection.

Harry tells me: “I’m not bothered by rejection. Especially rejection by middle-class people. I couldn’t give a damn what their opinion is. For me, when they reject me, it just gives more reinforcement to my ideas. . . . For other people that’s a real downer, to get rejected. So you can’t be a wilting flower and do this.”

At the same time, Harry notes, it’s hard to tell at the very beginning who will succeed or not. Harry tells me he was shy when he started canvassing, but that he grew and developed as a person because of his work.

Some things will work against you, he says. Being too emotionally transparent is a problem, because if your facial expression shows that you dislike something they say, a person won’t donate to you. Being afraid to argue or disagree is also a problem, because some people will like to test or try to provoke you before being willing to donate. But stoicism isn’t the answer; effective canvassers must be emotionally perceptive and be able to read body-language and nonverbal cues.

Good canvassers are often nonconformists with the ability to be enthusiastic. Canvassers who are more interested in talking about the issues than the money will—paradoxically—make more money.

Who to ask? You need to research potential donors, just as you would gather any other kind of valuable intelligence. Start with people you know, advises Flanagan. “Ask your fundraising committee to make a list of the names of people they personally can ask for a donation.”

In canvassing, Harry suggests, look for some key indicators that the people in a house might be sympathetic to your cause. Political signs during elections can help you pick out people with sympathetic politics, and you can cherry-pick promising houses during election time to return to later. Friendly politicians might be able to suggest promising neighborhoods. You can call a canvass director from another organization and ask for advice or offer a “turf rotation” so that you don’t canvass the same area around the same time.

Harry suggests that as you gain experience you’ll learn to pick up on some indicators of a promising donor. For environmental causes, he suggests, beware a well-manicured lawn and highly controlled yard. An untamed yard or garden is more promising. Signs of kids, young families, and young people tend to be good. And neighborhoods that are seen as current and happening are promising for environmental donations, including places with hip stores nearby (outdoor stores, yoga studios, even Starbucks).

Other causes are better matched to other demographics, writes Joan Flanagan. “If you want low-income people to respect your organization, ask them to give and to raise funds. Poor people, better than anyone else, know that if you want something, you have to pay for it.”234 And working-class people are proportionally more generous than affluent groups.

Build movements. Canvassing is a great way to build movements. I know a lot of radicals who would be afraid to talk to strangers about political beliefs. But Harry argues that face-to-face outreach is especially important for radical groups. “They try to discredit us in the media or in society by making us look foolish or extreme. Or making us look stupid or lumpen, like we’re just knee-jerk violent lunatics. . . . Putting a rational, nice-person face on radical ideas is going to build credibility for the movement, not discredit you as an individual. If we can build that [face-to-face] relationship, it makes it much harder to slander us in the media because we can counter-spin it.”

Flanagan explains: “If you want to raise money and at the same time identify the citizens who care about your cause, you have to ask people to give money to your organization because they want what it does. . . . The fastest, easiest, most accurate way to find the people who share your values is to ask them for money.”235 She adds: “Asking for money for your programs identifies the most interested donors, the most committed leaders, and the most desirable issues. Remember, this is building the broad base of givers, some of whom will later make larger gifts and bequests.”236

As a means of movement-building, fundraising forces us to learn to communicate both what we have achieved and what we want to achieve. Because we have to talk to strangers in tangible terms about what we are doing, it also helps us to develop our strategy and connect with new people.

Harry explains: “Canvassing is less about changing people’s minds than it is about finding like-minded people who already share your general goals. And that’s a valid function—and can support other attempts to change minds over the long haul. To win those people over you need to be confident, and show that you have a track record of success. If you have past victories then people can have more faith in your future plans. Once you’ve established that you are winners, you need to paint an inspiring vision of a future win that you can achieve (with their support).”

Frame radical messages. Radical groups have some special challenges in framing their messages for mass fundraising appeal. Harry advises that radicals have to figure out how their group’s issues fit into reasons people give. Being able to appeal to middle-class people with money helps. So does framing issues in a way that puts radicals on the winning team. “[Turn] your issues into stories that are sellable. It sounds like a weird process, but essentially that’s the job of fundraising: make your issues appeal to people who otherwise wouldn’t want to support you.”

Next, Harry says: “Go out there and talk to people about it. The process of developing those stories can’t happen in a meeting and then it’s like ‘It’s done!’ You’ve got to go out and try it on people. Because you never really know what’s going to tap into people, or different types of people, until you go and do it. It’s the experience of fundraising.”

“I think the truth is that a lot of people are afraid to knock on a stranger’s door and talk to them about stuff, especially stuff that’s socially marginalized.” He adds: “The honest truth is I love to talk to people I’m going to piss off. . . . I’d love to go and fundraise for an organization like [radical anti-poverty group] OCAP in a really rich neighborhood. You’d get a lot of slammed doors and piss off a lot of people, but the few people you did connect with would be huge supporters. They’d respect your strength in doing it.”

Radical ideas may not have mass popularity right now, but people who share them tend to feel very strongly. Harry explains: “In fundraising you can have an issue that’s an inch deep and a mile wide, and a million people will give you five dollars. And you can have an issue which is more radical, it’s like a mile deep and an inch wide. It’s just a matter of finding the right people.”

A radical or militant attitude can be really helpful for fundraising if you frame it properly. To fundraise well you have to come across as a confident person who believes that your group is really making a difference. And that’s a lot easier to do with radical groups than wishy-washy liberal organizations, as Harry explains: “I think liberal environmental groups are harmless, or mostly harmless. To be honest, raising awareness about issues (and by their very failure to make any systemic change) really lays the groundwork for more radical organizing.”

Radical groups can get a lot of donations by differentiating themselves from liberal groups working on the same issues, by showing themselves to be braver or more effective. To be able to say “we’re the only ones doing” a certain kind of work is very powerful as a fundraising pitch.

The middle class is fickle, Harry tells me, especially on class issues, but for radical environmental issues the middle class is a huge fundraising base. “Everyone knows that turning your lights off during Earth Hour is futile, everyone’s waiting for someone to come along and tell them what to do. Something that might actually work. The mood is angry out there.”

Joan Flanagan argues: “Controversy is usually very good for your fundraising, because it will clarify the issue and emphasize the urgency of the need. When the Seattle conservatives forced the United Way to expel Planned Parenthood, they were doing Planned Parenthood a favor. Leaders from that organization went directly to local individuals and businesses for support. Result: their donor list went from three thousand to seventeen thousand people, and they made up more than the $450,000 lost from the United Way. . . . Any controversy will get your organization’s name out in the public. Most service delivery organizations lose more people from apathy and boredom than from honest differences of opinion. A good fight will help you define who is on your side.”237

Even a bad political climate can help radicals fundraise. Harry explains: “Nothing is better for us than right-wing governments. The amount of money you make, the amount of headway you make, the amount of recruiting you do with opponents in power is way better than when your quote ‘allies’ are in power.”

Build relationships and escalate. Grassroots fundraising, as Harry tells me, is about the long game. At first, the goal is to build affinity with people, to build personal relationships and lists of promising donors. In the first year, professional canvassing operations typically lose money. They might break even in the second year. Only in the third year and afterward do they start to be real sources of money.

The challenge is to keep going when it is tough at the start. “In the first year, if you have an issue that’s unpopular, that’s a very emotionally trying thing. You’re getting rejected a lot.” He adds: “But in a second year, or a third year, when you have a list of people who already gave to you and know that a couple doors down the street there’s someone a lot more sympathetic, who gave you a hundred bucks or five hundred bucks last year. It suddenly makes it a lot easier to do.”

It’s important to keep new supporters engaged and build their relationship with your group over time. Harry: “Send them regular emails. Not too frequent. Don’t send them an email unless there’s content to it because people will ignore it. But send an email when you have something to report. Boast about your victories. . . . Say ‘this never would have happened without us.’ It’s something you can say about almost anything.”

You grow your fundraising base by adding new people every year, and by increasing the amounts that people give each year. Harry actually jokes with supporters that they should donate more because of moral inflation: “You gave us fifty bucks last year and you didn’t feel guilty, now you’ve got to give a hundred bucks not to feel guilty!”

Paid professionals or volunteer fundraisers? Professional fundraisers are skilled in the practicalities of their job, and not afraid to ask people for money. Since they’re being paid by what they raise, and since they can work full-time, they can raise a much larger gross than volunteers. The disadvantage is that they might not be as familiar with the people or issues (e.g., the “whales of the Great Lakes”). And you lose part of the revenue to pay their salaries. You’re in trouble if too much money is devoured by the operating costs of the fundraising apparatus.

Volunteer fundraisers may not have as much experience. But you can train them, they’re free (aside from the effort to coordinate them), and they may have better connections in their own communities than an outside professional. The fact that they’re doing it because they believe in their cause—rather than because they’re being paid—might help them convince people to donate.

However, Harry advises that large-scale fundraising isn’t as effective on a strictly volunteer basis. “If you want it to be successful then you can’t do it on the basis of volunteers. . . . No one’s going to canvass in January and February when it’s twenty or thirty degrees [F], as a volunteer. No one’s going to do it every single day and learn the skills to do it. I’m a good canvasser, and it took me three months to learn it. A volunteer is never going to cross that threshold. You have to do it consistently over a period of time, and really in our society the only way to do that is if you’re really, really rich or if you are getting paid.”

Funding Sources for Resistance Movements

Resistance groups get funding and support from a wide variety of sources including:

To get started, figure out how much money you’d like to raise and which sources are best suited to your group. A diversity of sources can make your funding more robust in the face of disruption. Try to make reasonable estimates of how much you can raise from each activity, to research prospects for fundraising.

Small gifts. Small individual donations are the foundation of grassroots fundraising. Large donations and grants have promise, but can leave groups at the whim of a few powerful individuals. Large numbers of small donations are more work to get, but they can also help you build a real base, a community to which you are accountable.

A personal approach is important when first making contact. Mass mailings and online appeals can be very effective. But, Harry warns, “online fundraising is way overrated.” It’s popular because it’s cheap, and it can be very effective when it is an urgent appeal for a specific issue. But generally, only one in a thousand people will actually respond to a mass online request. It’s the face-to-face relationship that makes individual appeals work.

Special events and sales. Big events and benefits like concerts, dances, bake sales or film screenings are important funding sources for some. They can also be a big investment in time and resources, an investment that might not pay off (grassroots groups need to be cautious about the risk of losing money). Big events can also divert your time and resources away from the core work you want to do. But if an event is well suited to your base, and if it works reasonably well, you can repeat it and improve it. Like fundraising in general, it may take multiple tries before it becomes polished enough to be a good moneymaker.

Selling stuff to fundraise on an ongoing basis may reduce the risk of a single big event. The downside of selling things, of course, is that part of your income goes to paying expenses, handling stock, breakage, et cetera. So if someone is participating just because they want to give you money, it’s better to ask them for $20 than to sell them something for $20 if only half of that is actual profit.

Fundraising groups can reduce stock handling expenses by selling lowcost items that are mostly symbolic tokens. Veteran organizations give poppies in exchange for a donation, radical groups may give or sell buttons, cards, newspapers, and so on.

During the 1920s the One Big Union (which was instrumental in the Winnipeg General Strike) made much of its money from a weekly lottery.

Tithes, dues, sustainers, and subscriptions. This category is the funding core for stable grassroots organizations. Many of the radical organizations I interviewed for this book relied on a small pool of regular individual donors. Because resistance movements—especially early on—are a minority of the population, they can never bring in the kind of mass fundraising that liberal organizations can. They depend on the “inch wide, mile deep” group of truly committed supporters.

Flanagan suggests: “Membership dues are the ideal form for annual fundraising, because they are the most democratic, dependable, and renewable form of fundraising. . . . For smaller organizations, your current members can sell memberships in person. If your cause has a broader appeal, especially if it is very popular or very controversial, you can hire professional fundraisers to mass-market memberships through direct mail, telemarketing, or a door-to-door canvass.”238

Besides money, sustainer donations or dues will help you build political power, “an accurate evaluation of your programs and leaders,” get people involved, and secure greater loyalty from donors.

Resistance movements often rely on membership dues. The Deacons for Defense had a $10 membership fee to join, followed by monthly dues of $2. Members had to pay their dues in order to vote, which was important because major decisions were made democratically.

Trade unions couldn’t exist without dues. The Industrial Workers of the World took dues seriously. Itinerant workers often “rode the rails” to get around, and the IWW card ensured access to the right train cars. People who didn’t have a card might actually get kicked off the train.

The tithe is closely related; the word is from Old English meaning tenth: that is, people would give a tenth (or 10 percent) of their income to the church. This wasn’t always money; it could have been food or other goods. Resisters can use tithes, too.

Regular donors—such as those who donate on a monthly basis—are often called “sustainers”—Harry advises not to use the term “members” for people who aren’t active participants. Most people who give don’t want to be members—they donate because they don’t want to do things.

Donors don’t have to give support only in money—resistance movements also need support in-kind—supplies, equipment, rooms and spaces, and so on. Supporters can even put people up—“resisters in residence”—to cut their living costs.

Grants, foundations, and major gifts. Depending on the kind of work you do, you may be able to get grants from foundations or institutions. Grants can be well worth the effort, especially if they (a) are easy to get or (b) will let you take on projects you couldn’t tackle otherwise. Grants rarely offer support for core staff or organizations.

Private donors may be willing to give large gifts—this usually happens after a long period of relationship building and visits. People have to be encouraged, over time, to move upward on the fundraising pyramid.

There are some unusual grants out there, however, from radical funders. And there are unconventional sources of funding from institutions; I spoke to people at one environmental nonprofit who got early funding from “bounties” paid for identifying small oil leaks into waterways. By surveying the nearby harbor for leaks they advanced their mission and helped fund themselves.

Revolution on a shoestring. “A penny saved is a penny earned,” the saying goes. Up to a point, efforts to reduce your overhead expenses can be just as rewarding as raising new money. Often what revolutionaries need most of all isn’t money—it’s time. To become a radical you need enough time to process and analyze your own experiences. To take action, you need even more time.

Most of the people I interviewed worked from campaign to campaign, rather than as part of formally organized and paying resistance groups. As such, they each had their own mix of strategies to spend as much time as possible doing work they thought important.

These included:

For insurgents in the Global South, revolution on a shoestring may look even more extreme. Arundhati Roy describes a Naxalite revolutionary camp in India like so: “I looked around at the camp before we left. There are no signs that almost a hundred people had camped here, except for some ash where the fires had been. I cannot believe this army. As far as consumption goes, it’s more Gandhian than any Gandhian, and has a lighter carbon footprint than any climate change evangelist. But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt for example, it is stripped down and every part is cannibalized. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a [rifle] barrel, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging.”239

Expropriation & illegal activities. The George Jackson Brigade wrote: “There can be no revolution without money—for weapons, explosives, survival, organizing, printing, etc. The people are poor. We will make the ruling class pay for its own destruction by expropriating our funds from them and their banks.”240

Since resistance groups already reject existing legal authority, there is a certain logic to expropriation as a source of funds. (Robin Hood certainly thought so.) The benefit for underground revolutionary groups is that they already have the security infrastructure needed to break the law.

That may be low-risk activity like setting up a squat, shoplifting, or taking advantage of bankruptcy loopholes. Movements in the past have printed counterfeit money.

Some groups have escalated to robbing banks or Brink’s trucks (risky tactics used by members of the George Jackson Brigade and the Black Liberation Army, among many others). Others (like Direct Action) steal cars or property. A few resistance organizations have gotten involved in other illegal activities like the drug trade.

But that road involves many risks and dangers. Some members of the Black Panther Party started to extort business owners and skim the drug trade late in the life of the organization, but it’s hard for a movement to keep its moral standing once involved in such things. (Recruiting the people who really wanted to do those things also caused a lot of problems for the BPP.) Minor crime like shoplifting is a very bad idea for people who are underground or trying to keep a low profile. Aboveground groups should be careful about breaking the law if it will make those in power better able to demonize them as criminals.

Sometimes anti-poverty or anti-capitalist groups will use public expropriation as a form of action and a form of logistical support. The Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil seizes tracts of land owned by wealthy landowners and builds subsistence communities for the poor. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty has used a related tactic; after a social assistance food subsidy was abolished, people went in groups to the supermarket, filled their carts, and then handed in a “voucher” to the cashier as they passed through with the food they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to pay for.

In times of unrest this may be commonplace. In Greece after the economic upheavals of recent years, some anarchists started liberating and redistributing food to people who needed it. Nikos, an anarchist from Athens, explained how teams of thirty masked anarchists would run into major supermarkets and fill shopping carts with food. “Sometimes people would calm the workers, saying that it was an expropriation and that all the food would be distributed for free, we were against property but we didn’t want to hurt anybody. And we always made sure to get out of there very quickly.” Then they would redistribute the food in open-air markets. Soon it became a regular routine that hungry people would look forward to. “It was a nice feeling, to include all these people in our illegality. Also they learned not to be afraid of the koukoulofori [masked activists]. The people who were masked up, dressed in black, and doing outrageous things were on their side. That was very important.”241

THE BLOCKADE OF THE THORSCAPE

It’s the night of August 26, 1986. It’s dark and raining heavily in Montreal. A huge oceangoing freighter is arriving from apartheid South Africa. The ship carries a million kilograms of yellowcake—refined uranium ore—which was mined in Namibia under South African occupation. The ore is to be processed in Canada and then shipped to the United States and Japan, despite a UN decree that no country should buy minerals extracted from Namibia.242

A loose coalition of anti-war and anti-apartheid groups has organized to stop the ship from unloading the uranium. Activists have tried to block land access to the dock in the past, but police broke their lines. Tonight, the goal is to stop the ship from ever reaching dock. Organizers in Montreal have a new tactic: they plan to surround the freighter with a flotilla of tiny motorboats, to force the ship away from the dock by putting their own bodies on the line. They’ve sent a call for action for activists to join them.

Among those who respond are Pamela Cross and Peter Dundas, Ontario-based activists who’ve come in part to build solidarity with Quebec activists. Pamela and Peter bring with them a borrowed aluminum boat.

When they meet other participants in a Montreal apartment, it becomes immediately clear to them that there are some problems. Although the group has rented a number of boats, no one else in the group has boating experience. When they ask for a map of the action site, the organizers—seemingly confused about why one would need a map at all—give them one drawn on a napkin. Some participants speak only English, others speak only French. A group of lesbian separatists wants to make sure that they have no men in their boat, and also that they are not adjacent to men in other boats once the blockade begins. It’s decided that the lesbian separatist boat will go ahead of Pamela and Peter’s boat—so as a compromise, Peter will sit at the back and Pamela in the front.

The organizers have spotters stationed along the St. Lawrence River to track the progress of the freighter. But when it is time to move from the apartment to launch sites, there is another glitch: the organizers do not have enough cars. Pamela and Peter cram a few extra people into their van. Police follow them all the way to the launch site. When they arrive it is still cold and pouring rain. Pamela and Peter seem to be the only ones who brought rain gear, so they buy garbage bags at a corner store to make improvised ponchos.

By the time they actually launch the boats it is two o’clock in the morning. Large waves are rolling through Montreal’s harbor. As Pamela and Peter pull out toward the freighter, none of the other boats in their flotilla are anywhere to be seen. The freighter, escorted by ten police launches with bright searchlights, is absolutely huge. Even in the distance it looms over their tiny boat. They get close enough that they can stare up at it, as one would stare up at a skyscraper from a sidewalk. If they get too close, they will be swamped.

It is apparent that the flotilla isn’t going to show up. So Pamela and Peter are ready to return to shore. But there’s another problem. Their napkin map has disintegrated. It’s pitch black. Police are everywhere on the shore of the port and to dock there would mean immediate arrest.

Peter and Pamela stay out in the harbor for five hours, evading police launches and looking for a place to dock. Eventually they pull up at a country club dock and find a pay phone to call the support line. The organizers, for some reason, have put the least experienced person on the support line. The woman who answers is not reassuring. “I don’t know what to do! I don’t know where anyone is! I’m freaking out!”

They manage to find their way back to their original launch location. The boat with the lesbian separatists is floating nearby, becalmed. The rental boats, it turns out, did not come with gas, and so their boat got only a short distance before running out. A debate ensues among the lesbian separatists about whether Peter would be allowed to tow them back to shore. After some discussion, they throw him a towrope.

They land their boat and track down the rest of the group. Eventually they find them, warm, dry, and watching TV in some basement. Pam and Peter are dripping wet. “What the fuck!” exclaims Peter.

“Oh, we never actually got out on the water,” someone explains. “You actually went out there?”

“Yes!” replies Pamela. “We came out here to be part of your action!”

Everyone has their own story about why they didn’t launch their boat. They couldn’t get the motor started. The police stopped them. It was raining too much. One participant was arrested because of an unpaid fine. Logistically, the action was an absolute disaster. As one organizer wrote after the fact, “Everything that potentially could go wrong during the action did.”

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Though the attempt at a flotilla was a failure and logistical nightmare, organizers targeting the uranium imports were persistent. After the ship was docked, protesters chained themselves to fences. There was widespread media coverage. A few months later, the shipping line that owned the Thorscape announced that it was refusing to carry any more uranium because of the public outcry. So with persistence they achieved a small victory, despite the logistical disarray.

LOGISTICS FOR REVOLUTIONARIES

Enthusiastic militants who focus on conflict sometimes overlook the support needed to sustain that conflict. Even actions like the attempted blockade of the Thorscape—a small action compared to larger campaigns—require a lot of logistical support. Effective campaigns and organizations need a strong support base. If a group fails to develop enough logistical capacity, their actions are limited to the most basic, the small-scale, and the intermittent.

Logistics are important—really important—for any group that wants to move from dissidence to resistance. Military writers like General Antoine-Henri Jomini ranked logistics on par with strategy and tactics. When the African National Congress was banned, they created five departments as part of their underground organization; three of them dedicated specifically to logistics (and one to intelligence).

Logistics are very different for conventional militaries compared with resistance organizations. As in the example of Vietnam at the beginning of this chapter, conventional militaries have an enormous and expensive supply train stretching great distances, from the safe “rear area” to the front. One US admiral wrote of it as “a continuous bridge or chain of interdependent activities linking combat forces with their roots in the national economy.”243

This also makes conventional militaries vulnerable. As Stan Goff wrote: “U.S. forces, even the hardest of the hard core, cannot long sustain operations abroad without a huge logistical tail. At bottom, they are products of a pampered and pasteurized society, and they are very fragile. You can put all the muscles you want on a U.S. soldier, and a local E. coli will bring him crashing down like a tall tree.”244

Indeed, any industrial economy is full of rich targets for logistical disruption. For the resister, logistics are both a necessity and a weapon. Road and rail blockades work for that reason.

Effective resistance movements, in contrast to militaries, are localized. They are rooted in the communities that support them. Their supply chains are short and simple. (The US Field Manual on Guerrilla Warfare notes that the logistical requirements of a guerrilla force “are rudimentary and simple when compared to a conventional force of similar size.”) Rarely do they have a safe “rear area,” because they are under occupation and outgunned.

This is especially true for armed organizations. Guerrilla logistics do not and cannot consist of large warehouses, transport truck convoys, or intercontinental cargo airplanes. Instead, logistics mirror the structure of an asymmetric warfare organization. Storage and distribution are clandestine, decentralized, and highly mobile. Instead of warehouses, guerrillas have concealed caches. Instead of convoys, supply packages are moved secretly through a variety of creative means.

What are the logistical requirements of a resistance movement?245 They include:

Clearly logistics is a very expansive category, which is why most of the people in most resistance movements spend most of their time working on it. Remember that only a small percentage of the people in any movement are actually on the front lines of the conflict.

The attempted blockade of the Thorscape failed in part because it lacked logistical support in most of these areas. Appropriate clothing (like rain gear) was not available. The equipment needed for the action (such as boats with gas) was not available. There wasn’t enough transportation to get people to the boats. The person on the support line didn’t know what was going on. And so on. Frankly, it was fortunate that no one got hypothermia or drowned.

Making sure you have the right equipment, supplies, and support is an important part of action planning (which I’ll talk about in the next chapter). If you are always scrambling to deal with basic logistics for every action, your group needs to build more logistical capacity. This is a common problem for militants, and was a challenge for the George Jackson Brigade. “A brigade has an intelligence unit, a supply unit and a combat unit,” explained Ed Mead. “All we had was a combat unit.”246

The George Jackson Brigade learned this the hard way (as they explained in a 1977 open letter). Not long after one in a series of bank robberies, brigade member Rita Brown was out walking the group’s dog. Unfortunately, she had a distinctive hairstyle which the FBI knew about; she was spotted and arrested. The rest of the brigade heard about it on the police scanner, and scrambled to respond. Should they evacuate? Where was Rita Brown being held, and could she be rescued? The police scanner told them little.

Preparing to abandon their safe house, they burned some of their personal effects, and loaded the most valuable equipment (like weapons and ammunition) into a vehicle. But it was so heavy that the car could barely drive a block; they had to turn around, get another vehicle, and hastily redistribute their salvaged supplies. They left and unloaded at a safe place. Then they decided to try to retrieve another load of materiel from their base. But by the time they drove back to their old neighborhood, they could see FBI cars converging to raid their house. They lost almost everything.

The FBI found their house. But not because of Rita Brown, who stayed silent. Rather, it was because of the dog, also in police custody. The brigade had always been careful to remove the dog’s license tag when they left the house with him. But they had never thought to remove the dog’s rabies tag, a logistical oversight that allowed the police to quickly locate their house. “This mistake cost us our base,” they wrote.

They analyzed their mistakes in detail in their open letter, adding: “We overestimated the security of our house and failed to develop clear emergency plans that would have allowed us to evacuate the most valuable equipment, tools, clothes and supplies first. This mistake cost us 90% of our supplies and equipment. We seem to pay dearly for small mistakes in this work. Overall, we made the mistake of too much doing with too little thinking and discussion.”

In the two months before the raid, the small brigade had carried out two bank robberies, four or five bombings, published lengthy political statements, prepared for several other major actions, and did other maintenance work on their vehicles and equipment. When they worked, “the tasks themselves were identified and defined spontaneously, as they came up, with very little advance planning.”247

They went over these shortcomings in detail and came up with concrete responses: to have clearly defined areas of responsibility for work, and commitments to action that matched their number of people. They also set aside a day each week for planning and discussion, resolved to make a practical evacuation plan and to practice it.248

■    ■    ■

Part of the reason militants sometimes lack logistical support is that combatants may look down on social justice workers who provide services or do general community organizing. It is often the more moderate, stable organizations that have a logistical base: groups with offices and training space, meal providers and community kitchens, radical lawyers. These people can provide much of the logistical advice or support combatants need. But they can’t provide it if militants fail to build relationships with those moderates, or if militants have a more-radical-than-thou attitude that impedes cooperation.

Providing community services has gone hand in hand with revolutionary organizing for a very long time. Look at what the Black Panther Party did with their community programs. Or consider the work of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the struggle to overthrow the dictator Somoza.

Logistical Planning

If you want to ensure that your movement has the logistical support needed to fight the long fight, you need to plan ahead. The US Guerrilla Warfare Manual suggests four steps for resistance logisticians. First, determine requirements. What amount of supplies do you need, what kind of logistical capacity is required? Like intelligence, logistics goes hand in hand with strategy and action planning. The people managing logistics need to know what they may be expected to provide. And the people working on action planning need to know whether the logistics they want will actually be available. This may simply mean budgeting.

The second step is to stockpile in advance of conflict. Resistance groups accumulate the supplies they need to sustain operations and to provide some buffer in case of unexpected events. Stockpiling could also mean building up a “war chest” of funds before a major campaign.

A third step is prepackaging; supplies are not simply stored on pallets in a warehouse, but are packaged from the get-go in a way that will make them useful and portable to those working in the field. So, flashlights packaged with extra batteries, boxes of medical supplies broken out into first aid kits, and so on.

And lastly, pre-emergency caches are prepared and put in place before operations or the outbreak of conflict. The emphasis there is on guerrilla conflict, but it still makes sense for supplies to be put near where they will be needed, and to avoid putting all of the supplies in one place where they can be captured or destroyed at once. (During large protests, police routinely raid activist headquarters and hangouts to disrupt organization and seize equipment.)

In his book For Want of a Nail: The Impact on War of Logistics and Communications, Kenneth Macksey identifies six key logistical principles: foresight, economy, flexibility, simplicity, co-operation, and self-sufficiency.249

Foresight: resistance groups plan in advance and anticipate what they might need to avoid scrambling or scarcity. Economy: groups avoid using excessive resources; they try to minimize their consumption. Flexibility: resistance groups shouldn’t be too picky about their supplies; they substitute as needed to do their job (so, armed resistance groups use whatever weapons they can scrounge, rather than insisting on getting ammunition for their preferred weapon). Simplicity: groups rely on a basic, functional supply system rather than an elaborate and expensive one. Co-operation: groups share their logistical systems and resources where possible, rather than building unnecessarily redundant systems. Self-sufficiency: groups provide for themselves or get supplies locally whenever possible, rather than relying on outside support or long supply chains.

Locally rooted resistance groups with good planning and organization are well-positioned to implement these principles.

Macksey’s logistical principles remind me of an old Depression-era saying: “Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.”

Lea Guido was the secretary general of the revolutionary women’s association AMPRONAC during the Sandinista struggle, and minister of social welfare in the reconstruction government that followed.250 She explained to author Margaret Randall how the women’s association expanded its mission after open insurrection began in September of 1978: “We felt the situation had changed qualitatively and it was no longer a priority to organize only women. The immediate task was to mobilize everyone against Somoza. We began organizing civil defense committees, which later, after the war ended, became the Sandinist Defence Committees. We provided the neighborhoods with wood block mimeos, organized first-aid courses and supply depots for basic foodstuffs.”251

She adds: “We set up clinics . . . houses where medical attention could be meted out during the war. We gave intensive first-aid courses in semi-underground conditions. We promoted massive inoculation programs, knowing we’d have thousands of wounded. We set up a number of neighborhood groceries which were covers for storehouses of basic foodstuffs: rice, beans, etc.”252

This kind of logistical capacity is not built up overnight. In fact, it is very difficult to establish even for people who are quite good at it. The Sadinistas—with their hands-on constituency of working-class people, small farmers, and so on—proved adaptable and capable in building that kind of capacity.

It’s easy to forget that effective resistance movements through most of history have been based on simple technology and community-scale economics.253 The French Maquis had no supermarkets, the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers no FedEx, the Irish Republican Brotherhood no electricity, and far more resistance movements have relied on movement by foot, mule, or bicycle than by automobile or plane. So it was for most of history and (provided that humans survive the next century) in the future resistance groups may find themselves operating under conditions rather more like those of historical groups.

In order to be successful in a time of economic and industrial collapse, aboveground resistance movements also need to help develop localized ways of meeting basic human needs—food, water, shelter, and so on.254

The PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde are a good example of this. Remember that a young Amílcar Cabral became a revolutionary (and an agronomist) because he saw his own people starve. The destruction of fragile soils on densely populated Cape Verde was a direct result of colonial exploitation.

Because people were so hungry and so poor on the islands of Cape Verde, there was little logistical capacity to support fighters; the armed guerrilla struggle took place mostly on mainland Guinea-Bissau. The PAIGC sought both to build up a revolutionary logistical system and to destroy logistical support for the colonizers. Patrick Chabal explains that Amílcar Cabral “envisioned the economy as a central aspect of the struggle for national liberation and he realized that it could be used as a weapon. Accordingly, it was PAIGC policy to systematically destroy, sabotage or in any way possible dismantle the colonial economy.” For growers that meant refusing to cultivate cash crops for export.255

The PAIGC set up a system of “people’s stores” which served as barter stations for basic goods. They offered goods at a lower price than the colonial stores. The PAIGC also abolished taxes in the liberated zone (something that they knew they wouldn’t be able to sustain under independence). The Portuguese responded by selling goods at less than cost, their own attempt at economic warfare.256

The PAIGC also put in place mobile hospitals and clinics.257 And along with the democratic revolutionary councils, village courts were set up, mostly to deal with less serious transgressions. They used traditional systems of reconciliation and restitution, explained Patrick Chabal: “The courts usually sought rehabilitation rather than punishment.”258

Agriculture was, of course, a centerpiece of PAIGC strategy. Recall that PAIGC militants worked the fields when they were not fighting. The 1965 revolutionary party guidelines included seven goals for agriculture:

Not all of this happened quickly, but yields did increase. At the same time, revolutionary fighters adapted their own logistical systems to suit the kind of war they fought. At first, the PAIGC used large, semi-permanent bases. These were quickly located and destroyed by superior Portuguese firepower, so they increasingly shifted to mobile, more self-sufficient guerrilla units.

The PAIGC is far from the only resistance group that had to reorganize for logistical reasons.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Greek Democratic Army (GDA) fought against both the Nazi occupation of Greece and the right-wing regime that followed. For most of the war they used asymmetric guerrilla tactics, but eventually switched to conventional army organization and tactics.

It was a disaster. In The Withered Vine: Logistics and the Communist Insurgency in Greece, Charles R. Shrader notes that “[l]arger, less mobile guerrilla formations are more vulnerable to enemy action, as are their training camps, supply dumps, hospitals, and other semifixed facilities as well as their lines of communication. At the same time, they become less able to sustain the spontaneous, incessant, and ubiquitous pinpricks that do so much to sap the strength and morale of the enemy. For a conventional army these handicaps are multiplied many times. . . . The attempt to create a conventional army imposed upon the GDA requirements for both combat and logistical personnel that it could not meet.”260 The GDA was defeated, primarily because of inadequate logistics.261

Vietnamese resistance movements, on the other hand, have built incredibly effective logistical support systems again and again. I wrote about the 1960s-era Tunnels of Cu Chi at the start of the chapter, but revolutionary Vietnamese logistics go back much earlier than that.

When the French colony of Vietnam was invaded by Japan during World War II, Vietnamese resisters founded the Viet Minh national liberation movement. They cobbled together arms and equipment from a variety of friendly and unfriendly sources; when the Japanese were defeated at the end of World War II, the Việt Minh captured huge stockpiles of arms to use against the French.262

The Việt Minh mobilized or engaged every civilian supporter, regardless of their particular skills. People with dexterity but less physical strength might do mending, older people with less mobility would keep watch, those with both strength and mobility were especially needed for logistics in a country with few rail lines or paved roads. For movement and distribution of supplies the Việt Minh mobilized supporters into an auxiliary force. According to one historian, “[t]he auxiliary force was organized in groups of 15 men each, with 3 groups making up a section and 3 sections a company. With this simple organization, the Vietminh accomplished almost incredible logistical feats.”263

Kenneth Macksey writes: “With hindsight, the French might admit that they never came to understand or calculate the strength of the flexible Viet Minh logistic system. They did not comprehend the thousand upon thousand porters who, ant-like, trudged through jungle paths carrying loads up to 45 lbs per man plus food and equipment: or that, from 1951, thousands of bicycles . . . had been adapted to carry 450 lbs, pushed along the trails. . . . They had not realised that, primitive as the means of Việt Minh transport were, its labyrinthine organization and vast scale made it proof against mere interdiction. . . . As a general rule, even a medium-sized guerrilla movement with a dedicated aim will survive, provided that it is even meagrely supplied from reasonably secure sources.”264

The Việt Minh were happy to use more intensive transportation—like trucks—if available, but could always fall back on large-scale human power if needed.265 Many of the same logistical techniques used by the Việt Minh were again used against American occupiers.

The Hồ Chí Minh Trail itself was a crucial logistical structure, allowing the resistance to bring personnel and supplies from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. It included more than sixteen thousand kilometers of braided paths, roads, and waterways which traversed much of Vietnam as well as parts of Laos and Cambodia.

The trail was operated by dedicated support units called Binh Trams. Each Binh Tram was responsible for a certain area of the trail, which had more than twenty major way-stations and a larger number of mobile stops and small way-stations (many buried underground). These stations served as rest and support stations for mobile personnel who often moved by foot. The Binh Trams offered food, shelter, guides, medical care, repair and maintenance of vehicles and equipment, as well as other logistical functions. Vehicle repair was important, because much materiel was moved by trucks at night and under jungle canopy. The way-stations were often one day’s drive apart for this reason. (Trucks would operate in relay style, dropping their load at a nearby way-station and then returning to their home base.) Some Binh Trams even erected antiaircraft defenses including antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missile batteries.

American logistics, on the other hand, were deeply and intrinsically flawed. The United States established a number of stationary logistical bases in the region, connected by convoy routes. Unlike the leaner Vietnamese system, these bases themselves used up much of the materiel delivered through the American supply chain. And the insurgents loved the opportunities represented by stationary targets with fixed, regular supply convoys traveling over land between them. Vietnamese guerrillas constantly raided the convoys for supplies. The United States eventually improved convoy security, but even small losses to the American supply chain were great boons to the spartan logistical networks of the Vietnamese guerrillas.

Liberation fighters in El Salvador in the 1980s faced a different situation, and used different logistical approaches to meet their needs. El Salvador had struggled under a succession of military dictatorships and authoritarian governments since the 1930s, and attempts at peaceful democratic reform in the 1970s had been crushed. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) was formed in 1980 as an umbrella front for smaller, preexisting leftist guerrilla groups.

José Angel Moroni Bracamonte and David E. Spencer make a lengthy analysis of FMLN logistics in their book Strategy and Tactics of the Salvadoran FMLN Guerrillas:

“Amateurs study strategy, while professionals study logistics.” The FMLN followed this maxim religiously, a fact which was largely responsible for its longevity and high level of military development. The FMLN was seldom short of equipment and, during the first years of the war, was often better equipped, supplied, and armed than the government forces. This was because the infrastructure had been developed over a number of years prior to the outbreak of major hostility.266

Early in the war, the FMLN spread disinformation suggesting that they obtained their arms from black-market dealers and raids on government forces, but in reality more than 90 percent of their equipment and arms came from a network of international supporters, including the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

As the war went on, many international sources of armament dried up, but the FMLN continued to receive weapons smuggled from the Sandinistas. Some were sent though hidden compartments in transport trucks carrying legal commodities, other shipments were sent using fishing trawlers as cover to move up and down the coast, with arms ferried in speedboats that could outrun the ships of the Salvadoran navy. (The speedboats were staffed by combat swimmers, and if the boat were about to be captured, they could detonate an explosive charge on board to sink the boat and then swim to shore.) The speedboats would meet small dugout canoes near shore, and those canoes would rendezvous with guerrilla logistics columns (often in dense mangroves) where the weapons could be cached or distributed by mule or small truck.267

Moroni Bracamonte and Spencer note that war materiel wasn’t solely imported. “Even though the FMLN received great quantities of weapons from outside El Salvador, over 600 tons in the first few years alone, it also implemented a plan for the massive creation of homemade weaponry such as mortars, rifle grenades, and mines. The refugee camps in Honduras, such as Mesa Grande and Colomoncagua, played an important role in this plan. They provided large quantities of material for the manufacture of mines and homemade weapons. Another important role played by these camps was in the manufacture and provision of uniforms for the guerrillas.”268

In the early years of the conflict, from 1980 to 1984, the guerrillas traveled with civilian groups, which they called masses. These people aided the guerrillas and would often provide food and labor. But the masses slowed the guerrillas down, made it difficult to conceal their location, and made the whole column vulnerable to attack.

So the FLMN learned, and adapted. Starting in 1985, the masses were separated from active guerrillas and a new logistics system was set up. Production committees of auxiliaries were set up to coordinate these activities near the guerrilla’s operational areas. With the help of local guerrillas, they collected “war taxes” from those living in the area. Logistical “ant columns” (which traveled by foot, mule, and small truck) moved these supplies to depots near guerrilla camps, where they would be further distributed by the cooks and servers in individual guerrilla units. Transportation mostly happened at night. Each camp also had a “brigadist” or paramedic, who provided first aid for the wounded and transported seriously injured people to secret hospitals.269

Logistical tasks and roles were set up at each level of the organization. “Within the FMLN organization was a man in each camp, each front, and each organization who held the title of logistician. The logistician was the key individual for the movement and storage of weapons and ammunition. Only the logistician controlled the rationing of weapons and ammunition within a camp. Because of this, the logisticians were considered very important people and worked closely with the commanders of the camps, units, fronts, and organizations.” Security concerns played an important role in this arrangement. “The separateness of the logistician was an intentional characteristic of this position and was an attempt by the FMLN to keep general knowledge of the location, quantities, and movement of weapons from the mass of the guerrilla combatants and sympathizers. The FMLN found in the early years that captured guerrillas talked too freely, and as a consequence the FMLN lost a lot of hard-to-replace materiel to government raids.”270

Logisticians also arranged the administration of caches. Each FMLN camp had a secret cache nearby; often these were simply large rooms dug into the ground. The entrances were small and camouflaged. The caches themselves were designed to protect weapons, ammunition, explosives, and other material from the elements.271

Moroni Bracamonte and Spencer emphasize the importance of logistics for any conflict. “In the final analysis, one of the constant lessons of war is that without the means to fight and to sustain the war effort, a fighting force is doomed. In addition, having a large supply of weapons, equipment, and men [sic] is absolutely useless unless you can deliver those men [sic] and their equipment and weapons effectively to the point at which they are needed, at the time they are needed. . . . Strategy and tactics mean nothing if they are not backed up by a solid logistical system. One of the great accomplishments of the FMLN . . . was . . . setting up a sound logistical foundation . . . one of the key reasons the FMLN was able to last for over twelve years of bitter conflict.”272

They kept up the fight as long as they needed to. In 1992 peace accords were signed that ended the armed conflict. The FMLN has remained an important cultural institution in the form of a major Salvadoran political party, and their enduring success underscores the necessity of strong logistical capacity.