Research

Quotes come from this article:

A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.

Perhaps it's for this reason that so many of the people who continually topple our movements enable gendered violence, and we continue to ignore them to our detriment.

Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away.

Twelve years later, and I feel like 'maybe' isn't strong enough. Definitely. We can spot the informants, or even people we perceive may become informants, because of what they do. Look at some of the folks on BreadTube, like Beau. He was convicted of alien smuggling, which involved a bunch of young women from Eastern Europe. For his own benefit, he knowingly exploited vulnerable women. Never once has he made amends (if that's even possible), never once has he even admitted it without couching it in leftist language and trying to get people to feel sorry for him.

We know what these people look like, and we keep giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence as a threat to the survival of our struggles.

Europe also refuses to acknowledge gendered violence, and our orgs are rife with abusers who have never been made to be accountable. In fact, this is why I am deeply suspicious of "accountability processes." They always seem to re-traumatise the victims and enable the abusers.

We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

Yep, though I feel like racism fits both things viewed as 'secondary' and as a 'real' issue, depending on the group you're in and the context of the discussion.

Several times he stated that his heart had been broken. He especially lamented all of the “young ladies” who left Common Ground as a result of Darby’s domineering, aggressive style of organizing. And when those “young ladies” complained? Well, their concerns likely fell on sympathetic but ultimately unresponsive ears—everything may have been true, and after the fact everyone admits how disruptive Darby was, quick to suggest violent, ill-conceived direct-action schemes that endangered everyone he worked with. There were even claims of Darby sexually assaulting female organizers at Common Ground and in general being dismissive of women working in the organization. Darby created conflict in all of the organizations he worked with, yet people were hesitant to hold him accountable because of his history and reputation as an organizer and his “dedication” to “the work.” People continued to defend him until he outed himself as an FBI informant. Even Rahim, for all of his guilt and angst, chose to leave Darby in charge of Common Ground although every time there was conflict in the organization it seemed to involve Darby.

Wow, it's like this shit is on repeat all the fucking time. Even without people being FBI informants, we still continually see orgs enabling people who act this way. So fucking tired.

Maybe if organizers made collective accountability around gender violence a central part of our practices we could neutralize people who are working on behalf of the state to undermine our struggles.

Maybe, but we also need to know that accountability and victims' needs have to work together. An accountability process, as so often happens, that involves anything that directly hurts a victim is less than worthless.

Informants are hard to spot, but my guess is that where there is smoke there is fire, and someone who creates chaos wherever he goes is either an informant or an irresponsible, unaccountable time bomb who can be unintentionally as effective at undermining social-justice organizing as an informant. Ultimately they both do the work of the state and need to be held accountable.

YEP. This can also be extended to incorporate a lot more people who continually sew discord, especially those who try to take over groups amidst the chaos.

Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown, each at different points in their experiences organizing with the Black Panther Party (BPP), cited sexism and the exploitation of women (and their organizing labor) in the BPP as one of their primary reasons for either leaving the group (in the cases of Brown and Shakur) or refusing to ever formally join (in Davis’s case). Although women were often expected to make significant personal sacrifices to support the movement, when women found themselves victimized by male comrades there was no support for them or channels to seek redress. Whether it was BPP organizers ignoring the fact that Eldridge Cleaver beat his wife, noted activist Kathleen Cleaver, men coercing women into sex, or just men treating women organizers as subordinated sexual playthings, the BPP and similar organizations tended not to take seriously the corrosive effects of gender violence on liberation struggle.

Examples of gendered violence in the BPP.

Her experience as the only woman to ever lead the BPP did not exempt her from the brutal misogyny of the organization. She recounts being assaulted by various male comrades (including Huey Newton) as well as being beaten and terrorized by Eldridge Cleaver, who threatened to “bury her in Algeria” during a delegation to China.

Refers to Elaine Brown's experiences.

These narratives demystify the legacy of gender violence of the very organizations that many of us look up to. They demonstrate how misogyny was normalized in these spaces, dismissed as “personal” or not as important as the more serious struggles against racism or class inequality. Gender violence has historically been deeply entrenched in the political practices of the Left and constituted one of the greatest (if largely unacknowledged) threats to the survival of these organizations.

It is 2022, and this is still true.

Race further complicates the ways in which gender violence unfolds in our communities... She points out how Common Ground failed to address white men’s assaults on their co-organizers and instead shifted the blame to the surrounding Black community, warning white women activists that they needed to be careful because New Orleans was a dangerous place. Ultimately it proved easier to criminalize Black men from the neighborhood than to acknowledge that white women and transgender organizers were most likely to be assaulted by white men they worked with. In one case, a white male volunteer was turned over to the police only after he sexually assaulted at least three women in one week. The privilege that white men enjoyed in Common Ground, an organization ostensibly committed to racial justice, meant that they could be violent toward women and queer activists, enact destructive behaviors that undermined the organization’s work, and know that the movement would not hold them accountable in the same way that it did Black men in the community where they worked.

And still, these tactics are also at play.

The women he dated were amazing, beautiful, kick-ass, radical women that he used as shields to get himself into places he knew would never be open to such a misogynist. I mean, if that cool woman who worked in Chiapas, spoke Spanish, and worked with undocumented immigrants was dating him, he must be down, right? Wrong.

It's amazing how often a lot of men (particularly cis men) use their partners to traverse the world, throwing us away when no longer useful. And sewing discord between us all.

But his misogyny didn’t end there; it was also reflected in his style of organizing. In meetings he always spoke the loudest and longest, using academic jargon that made any discussion excruciatingly more complex than necessary. The academic-speak intimidated people less educated than him because he seemed to know more about radical politics than anyone else. He would talk down to other men in the group, especially those he perceived to be less intelligent than him, which was basically everybody. Then he’d switch gears, apologize for dominating the space, and acknowledge his need to check his male privilege. Ironically, when people did attempt to call him out on his shit, he would feign ignorance—what could they mean, saying that his behavior was masculinist and sexist?

Why is this shit still happening?!

Reviewing old e-mails, I am shocked at the number of e-mails from men I organized with that were abusive in tone and content, how easily they would talk down to others for minor mistakes. I am more surprised at my meek, diplomatic responses—like an abuse survivor—as I attempted to placate compañeros who saw nothing wrong with yelling at their partners, friends, and other organizers.

So many examples follow from here, but all these things. Still happening, keep happening, keep getting enabled. No wonder we're all so fucking tired.

Most of those guys probably weren’t informants. Which is a pity because it means they are not getting paid a dime for all the destructive work they do.

Lmao, but true.

What’s more paralyzing to our work than when women and/or queer folks leave our movements because they have been repeatedly lied to, humiliated, physically/verbally/emotionally/sexually abused? Or when you have to postpone conversations about the work so that you can devote group meetings to addressing an individual member’s most recent offense? Or when that person spreads misinformation, creating confusion and friction among radical groups? Nothing slows down movement building like a misogynist.

Everyone I know, including myself, has left groups due to their enabling abuse, due to them putting forth more support for rapists and abusers than they do their victims... I've left the IWW for this shit multiple times, I've refused to participate in other similar labour orgs because they immediately started dumping work on me and leaving my needs unmet. And I've talked to dozens of women and queer folk who've felt the same.

They've also supported serial harassers, abusers, and rapists far more than they ever did us. And a lot of these misogynists are also anti-migrant, choosing to fuck us up for simply being from somewhere else.

What the FBI gets is that when there are people in activist spaces who are committed to taking power and who understand power as domination, our movements will never realize their potential to remake this world. If our energies are absorbed recuperating from the messes that informants (and people who just act like them) create, we will never be able to focus on the real work of getting free and building the kinds of life-affirming, people-centered communities that we want to live in. To paraphrase bell hooks, where there is a will to dominate there can be no justice, because we will inevitably continue reproducing the same kinds of injustice we claim to be struggling against. It is time for our movements to undergo a radical change from the inside out.

YEP. And have we learned this? Not yet.

We don’t have to start witch hunts to reveal misogynists and informants. They out themselves every time they refuse to apologize, take ownership of their actions, start conflicts and refuse to work them out through consensus, mistreat their compañer@s... Our strategies don’t have to be punitive; people are entitled to their mistakes. But we should expect that people will own those actions and not allow them to become a pattern.

Things I wish people would recognise.

Quotes from this post:

tl;dr: Prioritize long-term impact on the community’s safety over Twitter engagement

Pretty sure this'll get covered, but this is so much broader than just Twitter engagement. It's this desire to build celebrity around work that should just get done. The push for always needing credit and putting yourself in the way rather than just doing the work.

Make sure all information you publish is 100% verified.

Apply this across the board.

Work with Local Anti-Fascists

This is something that can be easily applied across a range of work. We need to be building more connections between local spaces, making it harder to disrupt everything we do. Our local spaces should be hubs that have multiple branches (internally and externally).

They are working with other community groups to ensure that the exposé does not cause collateral damage.

This is with regard to waiting on publishing something (especially because you're not in the local area), but it's something that should apply to abuse victims. Let them come forward when they need or want to.

There is a distinct lack of care in a lot of spaces, and that needs to be front and center always.

Publish Anonymously

I think this is true of other areas, but for a range of reasons beyond just safety.

Don’t Chase Clout or Career

Apply this across a board, too. We may live in a capitalist hellscape that requires we have cash, but don't do your work into careerist or clout-chasing trash.

Consider The Implications of Your Language & Actions

Glad to see this explicitly listed because far too many people lean on other hierarchies to dunk on folks. It's fucking oboxious.

Quotes from this article:

Before I get started, here's a thing I don't like about Matt's work thus far: He conflates too much with everything else. He does not critique events, he derides them inherently; he does not recognise that most people do not follow the beliefs he claims and builds strawmen to knock down (or talks about the few examples that exist while ignoring the many who aren't examples of what he's discussing).

It must be nice to do that from one of the places with some of the less serious anarchists, with those who fail to even consider people outside of hegemonic power (in any capacity) until they need solidarity (and refuse to give it in return). For it's not their opinions that are ever addressed; they are seen as unworthy until they can be used as baton.

But if we are not struggling as an organised class at work, where should such affinity groups be engaged in struggle? Insurrectionists have typically advocated a politics of ‘constant attack’. They relish in the images of street fights with police, the lighting of fires, and looting of stores.

I'm sorry, what are you talking about? This is not how all insurrectionary anarchists even talk or think, nor is it constant the world over. And it's not that they relish in those images. I mean, you reference Alfredo Bonanno. He deliberates about whether it would've been better to shoot Montanelli in the face than the legs ("Why on earth did these dear children shoot Montanelli in the legs? Wouldn’t it have been better to have shot him in the mouth?" in Armed Joy).

He's not relishing in that image, he's discussing about which tactic was better, what happened subsequent to him being shot in the legs, what would've happened had they shot him in the head, and how heavy of a decision it would've been to do that. He then ends that part by saying: "Revolutionaries are pious folk. The revolution is not a pious event." I cannot see any form of relishing going on here, and it feels insulting to say that insurrectionary anarchists would think this way.

The people you're talking about? Are those who glorify violence as much as they do military action.

Even many anarcha-feminists, who often talk about the theory around Kill Your Local Rapist, do not want to hurt people. They think about the consequences of doing so, and that includes the consequences to themselves and their consciences.

It’s obviously a good thing to feed someone who is hungry and we have no objections to breaking the law, but this is a strange idea of freedom. It assumes the insurmountable permanence of a society based on the existence of bosses, governments, and commodities. It proposes that we act as if capital and the State can never really be overthrown through a concrete transformation of social relations in production. Things can’t be changed, they can only be subverted or defied.

No, it doesn't. The overwhelming majority of insurrectionists I have read or talked to have seen themselves as a line of defense, not the end-all-be-all of getting to an anarchistic world. This includes the very one you fucking cite and the very fucking passage you choose to cite him in: "We have seen that a specific minority must take charge of the initial attack, surprising power and determining a situation of confusion which could put the forces of repression into difficulty and make the exploited masses reflect upon whether to intervene or not."

Not everyone has to intervene in that manner. And he even defines what is meant by 'specific minority', which he says isn't all anarchists or the whole revolution. It's right there.

With the George Flloyd Rebellion the politics of insurrectionary anarchism was put to a serious test.

It really wasn't.

The insurrectionists were presented with a nation-wide uprising which broke from legality and the control of any organisation.

Let's go back to that "specific minority" of people Bonanno mentions. Does this sentence make sense with that part of insurrectionist theory? I don't think so. Because not everyone in the street wants to participate in insurrectionary actions.

The ‘CHAZ’ (which, in reality, was never able to develop beyond a cop-free block-party) quickly stagnated, with no clear aims other than maintaining the occupation. The affinity groups attempted to maintain the rage, but were unable to encourage the rebellion in a revolutionary direction.

He cites an article from CrimethInc that talks about this and still walks away with that basic ass understanding? How do you walk away with that limited critique after you read this part (and the bits after): "At the same time, when the police are still so powerful and the ruling class that they serve is scrambling to legitimize them in the public eye, establishing a cop-free zone involves challenges and risks."

CrimethInc even mentions how these tactics have been used against Exarchia in Greece (which, for the record, goes unmentioned). The same applies to anything else outside the United States.

And even if you read Black Rose's critique and discussion, they don't refer to anyone as insurrectionary anarchists. Because I don't think many, if any, of those people aligned themselves to that theory. They also highlight really big issues (e.g., "no decision making process" and "failure of white ally politics"). It's a brutal misreading and misunderstanding of a theory if you're basing it on one thing in the United States.

All manner of cranks and adventurists were attracted to the project.

That's because this wasn't insurrectionary anarchism in action. I do not know how hard this is to understand, but it feels willful at this point.

Ultimately, a few armed individuals (having appointed themselves as a ‘patrol’) fired on and killed a few black teenagers speeding by in their car. Amidst the fog of uncertainty, vague reports spread on social media, exciting those who equate the use of arms with militancy. The killings were initially lauded in some insurrectionist corners of the internet as a successful case of ‘revolutionary self-defence’ against ‘right-wing infiltrators’.

Is there a point where we actually discuss these things? Instead of tossing them around to play gotcha points and neglecting that, while these are examples of right-wing and/or white supremacy in action, it doesn't fit into what is actually described by insurrectionary anarchism? And again, still requires people to actually align themselves with it?

Along with addressing the points as stated? Because the CrimethInc article he links says that DeJuan Young described experiencing attacks from white supremacists and others who infiltrated (not discussed in this article). It also fails to engage with this element of the Black Rose article, reading: "One of the most disturbing and important lessons from the CHOP is the need to develop well-organized and effective collective self-defense. On the night of Juneteenth, there were literally thousands of people in the space, many of them tourists and party goers."

The same article continues, "The first shooting was not the result of vigilante anti-protest political violence but violence that sprang from sources internal to the CHOP zone. In the days that followed, several more shootings took place in and around the zone. Though the shooters and motives are largely still unknown, it appears likely that a majority of the shootings were the result of interpersonal violence and gang retaliation."

And if we look back to Bonanno, he states: "It is precisely the comrades that are available for action who make up the specific minority. They will be the ones to prepare and realize the insurrection in the ways and forms which the experience of the revolutionary struggle as a whole has transmitted to us, taking into consideration the recent modifications of the State and the bosses. The method cannot fail to take account of minimal organizational forms of the base which will have to solve the various problems that will arise during the insurrectional preparation. In these organizational forms the responsibility for the work to be done must obviously fall on the revolutionary anarchist comrades and cannot be left to goodwill or improvisation. At this stage the very rules of survival impose the indispensable conditions of security and caution. The urgency of action puts an end to pointless chatter."

I wonder why he might say this. Could there have been any historical context for the development of his thought? Maybe some overtly authoritarian organisations in the 70s who kept pushing the working class out? Or any kind of heavy military shit going on in the 80s? Context matters for what people say and think.

Gilet Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement in France

Can someone tell me what the ideology of the Yellow Vests was? And what happened to them over time? Because it takes only a few minutes to find out that, while anti-government, they weren't inherently a movement of anarchists. Or insurrectionary anarchists, at that.

Oh, and bonus because this is hidden in a citation:

One can’t help but recall the uncritical enthusiasm demonstrated by many insurrectionary anarchists during the 2014 Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine. Not only was there little interest in the political character of the struggle, but even in the influential presence of far-right elements. People were in the streets, in violent conflict with the brutality of the State… Molotovs were being thrown! ‘What else is there to a revolution?’ This is how an ‘anarchist’ thinks when they are not concerned with class struggle and the need to transform the structures of production and distribution.

Which ones? Because guess what, that shit wasn't true for where I am. Most anarchists of all ilks in Eastern Europe knew better. So let's try again: Who are you criticising here? Because I'm noticing a theme, and it's often for English-speaking anarchists (and some Western ones) to grab hold of movements that they don't understand and to support them uncritically.

Wanna guess what? I can do that with the Anarchist Federation and their uncritical support of the Trucker Convoy in Canada (something suspiciously missing, which I suppose is perhaps because of how overtly right-wing that was and how nonsensical it was that someone in London thought it was at all a left-wing protest), but that doesn't mean it applies to all anarchists. Just like other left-wing groups have held onto the Dutch farmers or have decided to be anti-Ukraine. There are moments where, yes, we need to criticise people for grabbing onto any right-wing movement as if it's a fucking lifesaver (it isn't); it's also worth recognising who is actually involved.

Should I blanket all anarchists for uncritically supporting things we definitely shouldn't? Or should I make examples of the ones who do that, which proves the point that not all of us uncritically support shit? I think the latter proves more useful.

The pamphlet is notable, however, in that – when not simply reducing our class struggle politics to either a strawman of conservative syndicalism, or an opportunistic tailing of social movements – it concedes so much to the mass-anarchist analysis.

So do most insurrectionary anarchists, if you'd bother to spend any time talking to them at all.

... And I can't continue commenting because it turns into something devoid of context and substance, focusing on who Bonanno quotes and how right the author might be about the position he's taken.