after the crest - crimethinc

8/10/2019 After the Crest - Crimethinc

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As all movements inevitablyreach limits, it is pointlessto bewail their passingas i they would go on

growing indefinitely ionly the participantswere strategic enough.

text liberated from crimethinc.com by

oplopanax publishing


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Further ReadingTree Years since the Greek Insurrection, our interview with comrades inAthens about the months ollowing the uprising o December

Occupy Oakland Is Dead; Long Live the Oakland Commune

Cracking under Pressure: Narrating the Decline o the Amsterdam SquattersMovement, by Lynn Owens


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Tat was the last time I saw many o the comrades Id beriendedover the preceding months. Te eviction wasnt the greatest threat we acedafer all.

Repression hits hardest at the end.Government repression usually does not hit in ull orce until afer amovement has died down. It is most convenient or the state to attack

people when their support networks have collapsed and their attention iselsewhere. Operation Backfire struck years afer the high point o EarthLiberation Front momentum, when many o the participants had movedon and the communities that had supported them had disintegrated.Similarly, the authorities waited until May to strike back at Occupywith a series o entrapment cases. Te chie goal o repression is to open the ault lines within the tar-geted social body, isolating it and orcing it into a reactive position. Ideally,we should respond to repression in ways that establish new connectionsand position us or new offensives.

Hold your ground.How do we transition into other orms o connection when the excep-tional circumstances that drew us together are over? Te networks thatcoalesce effortlessly during the high point o momentum rarely survive.While new events were unolding, there was an obvious reward or set-ting differences aside and interrupting routines to converge. Aferwards,the large groups that ormed slowly break down into smaller ones, whilesmaller groups ofen vanish altogether. Te reshuffling o allegiances thattakes place during this period is vital, but its equally vital not to lose eachother in the shuffle.

During the crest o a movement, participants ofen take orgranted that it will leave them at a higher plateau when it is over. But thisis hardly guaranteed. Tis may be the most important question acing us aswe approach the next wave o struggles: how do we gain and hold ground?Political parties can measure their effectiveness according to how many newrecruits they retain, but anarchists must conceive o success differently. In the end, it isnt just organizations with contact lists that willremain afer the crest, but above all new questions, new practices, newpoints o reerence or how people can stand up or themselves. Passingthese memories along to the next generation is one o the most importantthings we can do.

At the high point, it seems like it will go on orever. You eel invincible, unstop-pable. Ten the crash comes: court cases, disintegration, depression. Once you go through this several times, the rhythm becomes amil-iar. It becomes possible to recognize these upheavals as the heartbeat o some-

thing greater than any single movement.

Over the past six years, cities around the world have seen peaks o struggle:Athens, London, Barcelona, Cairo, Oakland, Montral, Istanbul. A decadeago, anarchists would converge rom around the world to participate ina single summit protest. Now many have participated in months-longupheavals in their own cities, and more surely loom ahead. But what do we do afer the crest? I a single upheaval wont bringdown capitalism, we have to ask what matters about these high pointswhat we hope to get out o them, how they figure in our long-term vision,and how to make the most o the waning period that ollows them. Tis is

especially pressing today, when we can be sure that there are more upheav-als on the way. o this end, we have organized a dialogue with anarchists in someo the cities that have seen these climaxes o conflict, including Oakland,Barcelona, and Montral. Tis is the first in a series o reflections drawnrom those discussions. Practically all o the participants in these discussions indepen-dently reported that it was really hard or them to ormulate their thoughts:I dont know why, but whenever I sit down to work on it, I get depressed.Tis suggests a broader problem. Many anarchists depend on a trium-phalist narrative, in which we have to go rom victory to victory to haveanything to talk about. But movements, too, have natural lie cycles. Teyinevitably peak and die down. I our strategies are premised on endlessgrowth, we are setting ourselves up or inevitable ailure. Tat goes doubleor the narratives that determine our morale.

Movement A mysterious social phenomenon that aspires to growth yet,when observed, always appears to be in decline. When social change is gathering momentum, it is protean and thusinvisible; only when it stabilizes as a fixed quantity is it possible to affix alabel to it, and rom that moment on it can only decompose. Tis explains

why movements burst like comets into the public consciousness at the highpoint o their innovation, ollowed by a long tail o diminishing returns. A


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Be prepared for burnout and depression.Afer the crest, when the euphoria is over, many participants will expe-rience depression. Since the events that regularly brought them togetherhave ceased, they are isolated and more vulnerable. Others may veer intoaddiction: substance use can be a way to maintain intimacy with each otherand with danger itsel when there is no more fire in the streets. Te simplepleasures with which people celebrated their victories can expand to fill the

space lef by the receding tide o events, becoming sel-destructive. Tis isanother reason to establish new venues to maintain camaraderie and con-nection when the window o possibility is closing.

Save energy for the fallout.All o these problems are ofen intensified by the explosion o discordthat usually ollows a movements demise. Once it is clear that a move-ment is definitively over, all the conflicts that the participants have beenputting off come to the ore, or there is no longer any incentive to keepthem under the rug. Suppressed resentments and ideological differencessurace, along with serious allegations about abuse o power and violations

o consent. Learning rom these conflicts is an essential part o the processthat prepares the way or uture movements: or example, contemporaryanarchism is descended in part rom the eminist backlash that ollowedthe New Lef movements o the 1960s. But participants rarely think to saveenergy or this phase, and it can eel like thankless work, since the actionis ostensibly over.

It was a ew nights beore the eviction o the Occupy Philly encampment, andwe were holding a General Assembly to decide what to do. ensions wererunning high between the residents o the camp, who were primarily home-

less, and those who participated chiefly in meetings and working groups. Tatnight, a homeless man interrupted the GA to accuse several o those in lead-ership positions o being in league with the police, being racist, and planningto sell out the homeless. Te acilitator tried to ignore the disruption, but theangry man drowned him out and eventually riled up a ew more people whobegan shouting too. In this moment o chaos and heightened emotion, we hada unique opportunity. We could have shifed our ocus rom the threat thatthe government wanted us to react to, instead using that GA to finally addressthe tensions in our own group in hopes o building a orce that could surviveinto the next phase o struggle. Instead, the acilitator tried to restore orderby directing us to break into small groups and discuss what respect means.

My heart sank. Our shared energy was explosive; we needed to channel it,not suppress it.

sharper eye can see the social erment behind these explosions, perennial andboundless, alternately drawing in new participants and emitting new waveso activity, as i in successive breaths.

In Occupy Oakland, a three-week occupation gave way to a six-month decline. Tis bears repeating: movements spend most o their timein decline. Tat makes it all the more important to consider how to makethe most o the waning phase. As all movements inevitably reach limits, it is pointless to bewailtheir passingas i they would go on growing indefinitely i only the par-ticipants were strategic enough. I we presume the goal o any tactic isalways to maintain the momentum o a particular movement, we will neverbe able to do more than react quixotically against the inexorable passing otime. Rather than struggling to stave off dissolution, we should act with aneye to the uture. Tis could mean consolidating the connections that have devel-oped during the movement, or being sure to go out with a bang to inspireuture movements, or revealing the internal contradictions that the move-

ment never solved. Perhaps, once a movement has reached its limits, themost important thing to do in the waning phase is to point to what a uturemovement would have to do to transcend those limits.

We had occupied the building or almost 24 hours, and we were starting toimagine that we could somehow hold onto it. I was about to go out or sup-

plies to ortiy the place when something caught my eye. Tere in the dusto the abandoned garage was a hood ornament rom a car that hadnt beenmanuactured in years. I reached down to pick it up, then hesitated: Icould always look at it later. On impulse, I took it anyway. A hal hour later,a squad surrounded the building or blocks in every direction. We neverrecovered any o the things we built or brought there. Over a hundred o usmet, danced, and slept in that building, outside the bounds o anything wed

previously been able to imagine in our little town, and that little hood orna-ment is all I have to show it happened. When I visited my riends in the Bay Area the ollowing week, theywere in the same state o elation I had been when I lef the building: We walkaround and people see us and call out OCC-U-PY! Tings are just going to

grow and keep on growing!

Keep perspective.During a crescendo o social struggle, it can be difficult to maintain


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Te trajectory o green anarchist struggles in Oregon at the turno the last century offers a dramatic example o this kind o inflation. Atthe beginning, the goals were small and concrete: protect a specific treeor a specific stretch o orest. Afer the World rade Organization protestsin Seattle, the goals o green anarchists in the region hypertrophied untilthey reached a tactical impasse. When your immediate objective is to takedown industrial civilization, just about anything you can do is going to eelpointless. Indeed, during a declining phase, it may be important to resist thetendency to escalate. When the campaign ran aground, Root Forceset out to apply the same strategy against a much bigger targetscaling uprom a single animal testing corporation to the major inrastructural proj-ects underlying transnational capitalism. A-style campaign targetinga smaller corporation might have succeeded, empowering a new genera-tion to go on applying the strategy, but Root Force never even got off theground.

Quit while youre ahead.Te declining phase o a movement can be a dangerous time. Ofen, pop-ular support has died down and the orces o repression have regainedtheir ooting, but the participants still have high hopes and eel a sense ourgency. Sometimes its best to shif ocus beore something really debili-tating occurs. Yet quitting while youre ahead is complicated. I the connectionsthat have been made are premised on collective action, it can be difficult toretain these without staying in the streets together. Months afer Occupy Oakland was definitively over, police bru-tally attacked an anarchist march against Columbus Day, making several

arrests and pressing elony charges. It is an open question whether thisshowed that anarchists had overextended themselves, but afer a paybackaction the ollowing night in Oakland, street activity in the Bay Area dieddown or almost a year. On the other hand, afer the UK student movementdied down, an explosion o riots in August suggested that many o theunderclass participants elt abandoned by the withdrawal o their ormeractivist allies rom street action. It is possible that, had the movement con-tinued in some orm, the riots might have turned out differentlyas apoint o departure or another wave o collective struggle, rather than thedesperate act o a marginalized population rising ruinously against societyitsel.

perspective; some things seem central yet prove transitory, while otherthings all by the wayside that aferwards turn out to have been pivotal.Ofen, we miss opportunities to oster long-term connections, takingeach other or granted in the urgency o responding to immediate events.Aferwards, when the moment has passed, we dont know how to find eachotheror we have no reason to, having burned our bridges in high-stresssituations. What is really important, the tactical success o a particularaction, or the strength o the relationships that come out o it? Likewise, it is rarely easy to tell where you are in the trajectory oevents. At the beginning, when the window o possibility is wide open, it isunclear how ar things can go; ofen, anarchists wait to get involved untilothers have already determined the character o the movement. Later, atthe high point, it can seem that the participants are at the threshold otremendous new potentialwhen in act that window o possibility hasalready begun to close. Tis conusion makes it difficult to know when it isthe right time to shif gears to a new strategy.

We were outside at a ca in downtown Oakland a couple months later. I was

asking what my riends thought the prospects were or the uture. Tings willpick up again when spring arrives, they assured me. At first I believed them. Wasnt everyone saying the same thing allaround the country? Ten it hit me: we were sitting there in the sunshine,wearing t-shirts, in the city that had seen the most intense action o the wholeOccupy movement. I there wasnt another occupation there already, it wasntcoming back.

Keep the window of possibility open while you can; ifyou have to split, split on your own terms.

Movements usually begin with an explosion o uncertainty and poten-tial. So long as the limits are unclear, a wide range o participants havecause to get involved, while the authorities must hold back, unsure o theconsequences o repression. How do we keep this window o possibilityopen as long as possible without sidestepping real disagreements? (Tinko Occupy Wall Street when it first got off the ground and all manner oradical and reactionary tendencies mingled within it.) Is it better to post-pone clashes over ideological issuessuch as nonviolence versus diversityo tacticsor to precipitate them? (Tink o the controversial black bloc inOccupy Oakland on November , .) One way to approach this challenge is to try to clariy the issues

at stake without drawing fixed lines o political identity in the process.


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has closed and nobody wants to occupy anything at all. In a comic exam-ple o this tendency to fixate on certain tactics, afer Occupy Oakland wasevicted, Occupy Wall Street mailed a large number o tents across the coun-try as a gesture o support. Tese tents merely took up storage space overthe ollowing months as the struggle in Oakland reached its conclusion onother terrain.

Dont regress to outmoded strategies.Sometimes, afer a new strategy that is attuned to the present contexthas created new momentum, there is a tendency to revert to previousapproaches that have long ceased working. When people with little priorexperience converge in a movement, they sometimes demand guidancerom those who have a longer history o involvement; more ofen, it is theveterans themselves who demand to provide this guidance. Unortunately,longtime activists requently bring in old tactics and strategies, using thenew opportunity to resume the deeated projects o the past. For example, ourteen years ago, worldwide summit-hoppingoffered a way to exert transnational leverage against capitalist globalization,

offering a model to replace the local and national labor organizing that hadbeen outflanked by the international mobility o corporations. Yet whenlabor activists got involved, they criticized summit-hoppers or runningaround the world rather than organizing locally the old-ashioned way.Likewise, Occupy got off the ground because it offered a new model or anincreasingly precarious population to stand up or itsel without stable eco-nomic positions rom which to mobilize. But again, old-ashioned laboractivists saw this new movement only as a potential pool o bodies to sup-port union struggles, and channeled its momentum into easily coopteddead ends.

In the wake o every movement, we should study what its successesand ailures show about our current context, while recognizing that by thetime we can make use o those lessons the situation will have changed oncemore.

Beware of rising expectations.When a movement is at its high point, it becomes possible to act on ascale previously unimaginable. Tis can be debilitating aferwards, whenthe range o possibility contracts again and the participants are no longerinspired by the tactics they engaged in beore the crest. One way to pre-serve momentum past the end o a movement is to go on setting attainable

intermediate goals and affirming even the humblest efforts toward them.

As soon as a tactical or ideological disagreement is understood a conflictbetween distinct social bodies, the horizon begins to close. Te moment opotential depends on the fluidity o the movement, the circulation o ideasoutside their usual domains, the emergence o new social configurations,and the openness o individual participants to personal transormation.Te entrenchment o fixed camps undermines all o these. Tis problem is urther complicated by the act that the top prior-ity o the authorities is always to divide movementsofen along the samelines that the participants themselves wish to divide. It may be best to trynot to precipitate any permanent breaks until the horizon o possibility hasclosed, then make sure that the lines are drawn on your own terms, not theterms o the authorities or their unwitting liberal stooges.

Push the envelope.What is still possible once the horizon has been circumscribed? In a dyingmovement, one can still push the envelope, setting new precedents or theuture so subsequent struggles will be able to imagine going urther. Tisis a good reason not to avoid ideological clashes indefinitely; in order to

legitimize the tactics that will be needed in the uture, one ofen has tobegin by acting outside the prevailing consensus. For example, at the conclusion o November , , OccupyOakland participants controversially attempted to take over a building.Tis provoked a great deal o backlash, but it set a precedent or a series obuilding occupations that enabled Occupy to begin to challenge the sanc-tity o private property during its long waning phasegiving Occupy amuch more radical legacy than it would otherwise have had.

One years breakthroughs are the next years limitations.

During the burgeoning stage o a movement, participants ofen becomefixated on certain tactics. Tere is a tendency to try to repeat ones mostrecent successes; in the long run, this can only produce conservatism anddiminishing returns. Diminishing returns are still returns, o course, and atactic that is no longer effective in its original context may offer a great dealo potential in another settingwitness the occupation o aksim Squarein June , when no one in the US could imagine occupying anythingever again. But tactics and rhetoric eventually become used up. Once noone expects anything new rom them, the same slogans and strategies thatgenerated so much momentum become obstacles. As soon as Occupy is in the news, anyone who had an occupation

in mind had better hurry to carry it out beore the window o opportunity

after the crest - crimethinc

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