Demonstrating Resistance: Mass Action and Autonomous Action in the Election Year

In the past six years, the North American anarchist movement has gone through all the stages of a turbulent love affair with mass actions, including messy breakups and attempted reconciliations. In the process, some anarchists have taken up with other approaches to demonstration activism—including, most notably, an emphasis on more autonomous, decentralized actions. In this review of the past year’s demonstrations, we’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and analyze how these have played out in the streets. Demonstrating Resistance:
Mass Action and Autonomous Action in the Election Year: An analysis of the successes
and failures of recent militant demonstrations

In the past six years, the North American anarchist movement has gone through all
the stages of a turbulent love affair with mass actions, including messy breakups
and attempted reconciliations. In the process, some anarchists have taken up with
other approaches to demonstration activism—including, most notably, an emphasis on
more autonomous, decentralized actions. In this review of the past year’s demonstrations, we’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and analyze how these have played out in the streets.

In considering how to evaluate both mass and autonomous actions, we should begin by
establishing what it is fair to expect of them. Most anarchists thoughtlessly
describe them as direct action, but, technically speaking, demonstrations—even
confrontational, militant ones, in which police are forced out of neighborhoods,
corporate property is set afire, and bureaucratic summits are shut down—are not
direct action. Making love, growing or stealing food, providing free child
care—these are concrete actions that directly accomplish their goals. Militant
demonstration tactics, on the other hand, may qualify as direct action to the extent
to which they circumvent liberal or police control to make a point or create an
atmosphere outside the dictates of the powers that be, but most anarchists who
participate in them would argue that their primary purpose is to bring closer the
abolition of the hierarchies and institutions against which they are staged, and
viewed in this light they are generally more symbolic than direct. [1]

This is not to say that they are never worthwhile. Even if a demonstration doesn’t
serve to solve immediately the problem it is staged to address, it can contribute to
this process by spreading awareness, raising morale, exerting pressure on those
opposed, and providing useful experience for participants. Not even a whole city of
smashed windows could suffice to stop any one multinational corporation from
wrecking the ecosystem and exploiting workers; but if a broken window serves to
focus attention on an issue and inspire others to mobilize themselves, it at least
qualifies as highly effective indirect action.

The protests against the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in
November 1999 remain the most popular example of effective mass action in our time.
Though countless pundits have typed themselves blue in the face on the subject, it
is possible that anarchists have not yet finished refining the lessons of Seattle
regarding the advantages of the mass action model and the elements that must be in
place for it to work. The very fact that no mass action since Seattle has been as
successful should make it easier for us to evaluate what made it a success, now that
we have plenty of experience with actions that lacked those qualities.

What worked in Seattle and the mass demonstrations that followed it? When they were
effective, what exactly did they accomplish, and how?

First, it’s important to understand that, unlike every mass action that followed it,
the protests in Seattle benefited from the element of surprise. The powers that be
had no idea what they were in for, the police were correspondingly unprepared, and,
just as significantly, the corporate media didn’t know better than to broadcast the
news of the victory far and wide. When subsequent protests failed to succeed in
actually halting summit meetings, decimating shopping districts, or receiving
international news coverage, this should not have come as a shock: the forces of
repression were thoroughly prepared for them, and capitalist media moguls had
learned it was not in their best interest to advertise anti-capitalist resistance as
effective and exciting.

All the same, even without the element of surprise, subsequent mass actions were
effective in some ways. They brought attention to anarchist ideas and resistance,
enabled radicals to gain experience in militant tactics that were impossible in
other contexts, and continued to build momentum and connections in insurgent
communities.

The chief strengths of mass actions are due to the opportunities accorded by the
concentration of many radicals and activists in one space. When a broad range of
groups who regularly employ different tactics to address different issues come
together, all can benefit from the ways their different approaches complement one
another; not only this, but what they accomplish can easily be recognized as a part
of a broad-ranging program, rather than a single-issue campaign. For radicals who
are used to feeling like a powerless minority lost in a sea of apathy, the presence
of many others of like minds can be intensely empowering. In large groups, people
can inspire one another to find the courage and sense of entitlement necessary to
act in ways they otherwise would not, and there is no shortage of potential comrades
with whom to collaborate. When great numbers are present, radicals can plot
large-scale strategies and achieve ambitious goals, and the achievement of these
goals serves to attract future participants. So many beautiful people concentrated in one
space can create a temporary real-life example of an anarchist society, something
practically unimaginable for those who grew up in the sterile, colonized, hopeless
environments of modern day capitalism.

The other really advantageous aspect of mass actions is that they are accessible and
participatory. Because they can incorporate a wide range of tactics, they offer
space for participants of a wide range of capabilities and comfort levels; and as
they are announced openly and take place in public settings, people can join in
without need of special social connections. Thus, they serve to create new
connections between people and communities, and to provide points of entry for
atomized individuals into a mass movement. Additionally, because so many people,
both intentional participants and chance witnesses, experience them firsthand, news
about mass actions spreads easily through word of mouth and other non-corporate
channels. This makes it difficult for the corporate media to ignore them entirely
without risking a loss of popular credibility.

The limitations of the mass action model also became clearer and clearer as the
years passed after Seattle. Organizing events on such a large scale, not to mention
traveling to them from a great distance, demands a lot of energy and resources,
which must be drawn from the same pool of energy and resources upon which ongoing
and locally-based projects depend. If a demonstration results in mass arrests, as
the less militant civil-disobedience-oriented mass action models are wont to, this
can consume time, money, and attention that might be more profitably applied to some
constructive end; the same goes for the felony charges and arduous court cases that
can result from individual arrests at more militant actions. The connections made at
mass actions are more often between spatially distant, culturally homogenous
communities than between local, culturally dissimilar ones that could benefit from
continuing to work together outside the mass action format. It has been charged
that, though they demand a lot of organizing from those in the host city, mass actions
often drain more from local communities than they give to them. More insidiously,
because the mass action model focuses on exceptional events that largely take
place in well-known cities, it can foster the unhealthy impression that history is
determined at special occasions in Washington, DC rather than in the decisions
people everywhere make in their daily lives.

Because each mass action demands so much from so many, organizers who seek to put on
major demonstrations must compete with one another for the privilege of getting to
stage one of the few that can happen in any given period; under these conditions, it
is easy for authoritarians to seize the reigns, or sabotage the labors of many with
a few bad decisions. Because traveling great distances to events and risking arrest
is not feasible for people of many walks of life, the mass action model has been
criticized as the domain of privileged activists; this does not necessarily undercut
the possibility that it can achieve worthwhile goals, but it does indicate certain
limits to its effectiveness as outreach and as a participatory form of resistance.

Finally, and most significantly in the post-9/11 era, the mass action model enables
authorities to prepare extensively, making every demonstration into a spectacle of
their intimidating might. This gives the misleading impression that people are
powerless in the grip of an all-powerful government, when in fact the state must
draw troops from far and wide to stage these shows of force. It is especially
convenient for intelligence-gathering departments to have so many radicals
concentrated in one place, working on one project. Working publicly, in great
numbers and under constant surveillance, it is very difficult for radicals to
disseminate new tactical ideas without infiltrators and police apprehending them.

Knowing these limitations all too well, but not wishing to retire into inactivity,
some activists argue in favor of more decentralized, autonomous actions. Generally
speaking, an autonomous action is an action on a small enough scale that it can be
organized without coordination from a central body, below the radar of the
authorities. A classic modern day example of autonomous action is an attack on an
army recruiting station, in which its windows are broken and slogans are
spraypainted across its walls. Throughout this discussion, we will be addressing
three basic kinds of autonomous action: actions carried out by individuals or
individual affinity groups that take place entirely apart from mass actions; actions
carried out by individuals or affinity groups that coincide with mass actions; and
larger mobilizations, such as impromptu street marches, that are organized and
initiated autonomously by small groups.

The autonomous action model has many advantages that mass actions lack: such actions
almost always benefit from the element of surprise, they require significantly less
infrastructure and preparation, and those who organize them can choose the time and
terrain of engagement, rather than simply reacting to the decisions of the
authorities. Autonomous actions are perfect for those with limited resources who do
not desire to act in a high profile manner. They are practical and efficient for
striking small blows and maintaining pressure on a broad range of fronts, and
provide an excellent learning opportunity for small groups who wish to build up
experience together.

In choosing to focus on this model, however, activists should also take into account
the ways in which its advantages are also limitations. It is easy to maintain
secrecy in preparing for an autonomous action, but it is often correspondingly
difficult to spread word of it afterwards—let alone carry it out in a manner that
offers those outside the immediate circle of organizers the chance to join in. While
the autonomous action model is useful for those already involved in the direct
action movement, it is rarely useful for helping others get involved or develop more
experience. Without participatory, accessible forms of resistance, a movement cannot
be expected to grow.

The essential idea of autonomous action—that individuals can organize their own
activity, without need of direction or superstructure—is also the essence of
anarchism. The problem here is that the essential challenge of spreading the
autonomous action model is also the essential challenge of the anarchist revolution:
most people are not used to acting on their own—without direction, organization, and
the energy and sense of urgency that special events and large numbers of comrades
provide, many find it difficult to cross over from hesitation into action. Even for
those who hope to act autonomously, mass actions provide momentum, morale, crowd
cover, legal support, numbers, media attention, and many other important elements.
Outside the mass action model, we have to figure out how to do without these, or
provide for them some other way.

Focusing on autonomous actions is a strategic retreat for radicals if it means
dropping out of the public eye. Merely material blows, such as financial losses to
corporations, will not suffice to topple the powers that be, at least at this
juncture in the struggle; the hurricanes that struck the southeastern USA in the
summer of 2004 did literally tens of thousands of times the financial damage of all
the direct actions carried out that year combined, without posing any threat to the
stability of the capitalist order. What is truly dangerous about anticapitalist
resistance is not the actual effects of any given action, but the danger that it
might become contagious and spread [2]; and for this to be possible, people have to
hear about resistance, and know how to join in. Too often, autonomous actions that
are prepared and carried out in secret depend entirely on the media to publicize
them. With the corporate media determined to limit coverage of direct action and
independent media struggling to reach any audience beyond a few subcultural ghettos, this can
be a serious flaw.

Even when they do attract attention, autonomous actions do not necessarily mobilize
others. In the worst case, a direct action movement oriented around the autonomous
actions of a dynamic few can degenerate into a sort of spectator sport. This is one
of the many reasons most anarchists reject terrorism and other approaches that
depend on the actions of a vanguard: for an action model to stand a chance of being
useful in the project of revolutionary struggle, it must be possible for others to
adopt and apply it themselves—indeed, it must promote and encourage this, it must
seduce people into using it who might otherwise remain inactive.

Finally, while mass actions by their very nature involve and benefit from
large-scale coordination, it is more difficult to coordinate effective decentralized
actions. Clearly, as the past few years have shown, it’s not sufficient for some
lone maniac to issue a “call for autonomous actions” for them to take place
everywhere—or, and this might be even worse news, if they have been taking place
everywhere, it doesn’t seem to have made any discernable difference. We need a model
for autonomous actions that actually enables them to take place, and to be effective
when they do. In the discussion that follows, we’ll analyze the lessons of the past
year’s attempts to develop such a model.

In considering these issues, it’s important to emphasize that neither mass actions
nor autonomous actions represent the only possible form of radical activity—they
don’t, and shouldn’t, represent even the primary one. If a total moratorium on both
could enable an accordingly greater focus on other activities such as the
development of community infrastructure and alliances, it might be for the best for
the anarchist movement; some have argued in favor of just that. If we continue to
invest energy in demonstrations of any kind, it should be because they can, as part
of a broader strategy, enable us to make gains on other fronts as well; this author,
for one, feels strongly that this can be the case.


Background: Direct Action at Demonstrations from the 1990’s to 2004

Watershed events like the aforementioned protests in Seattle don’t just come out of
nowhere. Throughout the apparently quiet 1990’s, direct action groups like Earth
First! and Anti-Racist Action were acting on a smaller scale, building up experience
and momentum, while previously apathetic milieus like the punk rock scene and
college activism were politicized by lifestyle politics and the anti-sweatshop
campaign, respectively. Once Britain’s successes with the Reclaim the Streets model
demonstrated that mass anti-capitalist action was still possible in the post-modern
era, it was only a few months before activists tried to do something similar in the
USA at the meeting of the World Trade Organization.

The results surprised everybody. Suddenly, everyone had a working example of
anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist resistance as a reference point. Anarchists,
among other radicals, came out of the woodwork, and everyone was itching to have a
go at repeating that success. Because the Seattle protests had not been a mere fluke
but rather the culmination of a long period of growth and development, there was a
root structure in place to sustain further such actions—the most notable being the
protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C.
the following April, against the Democratic and Republican National Conventions that
summer, and against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec in April
2001. And because each demonstration attracted new attention and additional
participants to the anarchist movement, the root structure quickly deepened and
spread. The movement, focusing much of its energy on these convergences and mass
actions, rode a wave that sometimes made it appear to be an unstoppable historical force.

By summer of 2001, when great numbers of people participated in streetfighting at
the G8 summit in Italy and planning was underway for more protests against the IMF
in Washington, DC, some felt that the movement had reached the crest of that wave.
Many were exhausted from the demands of constant organizing, long-distance
traveling, and court cases; at least as many felt that the anarchist movement was on
the verge of a breakthrough that would change the nature of resistance in North
America. We’ll never know whether or not the effectiveness of mass mobilizations had
already reached its peak, for before the planned protests in DC could take place,
hijackers flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the
entire context changed. The anarchist response to the new situation was, for the
most part, embarrassing: rather than seizing the opportunity to emphasize that now
even U.S. citizens were dying as a result of their rulers’ foreign policies, many
hesitated to speak out in fear that they would be attacked or seen as insensitive, and thus
ceded all the gains made by anarchists over the preceding years. Fears ran rampant
that new anti-terror legislation and enforcement would be used to imprison and
suppress the anarchist movement, a concern that has since been shown to be
unfounded [3]. Now that most activists did not believe that positive revolutionary
change could be around the corner, all the internal conflicts and burnout that had
been building up over the preceding years of constant action came to the fore, and
over the following months anarchist communities saw the worst infighting in recent
history.

In retrospect, it is possible to argue that mainstream media attention was
responsible for a significant part of the high morale and sense of entitlement that
enabled anarchists to act so effectively in the period between the Seattle
demonstrations and the 9/11 attacks. Few if any in the anarchist milieu have
addressed this irony. In Western society, everyone is raised to desire, however
secretly, to be famous—to be on television – because what is on television is
“real,” is important. Although at the time many anarchists insisted they didn’t care
whether or not they received coverage in the corporate media, it could be said that
the simple knowledge that they were “famous” as a movement if not as individuals
sustained their spirits and sense of urgency. When this attention was withdrawn,
morale plummeted immediately. The corporate media is unlikely to return the
spotlight to anarchist activity in the foreseeable future, and the motivation of
anarchists should not be dependent upon other’s representations of them in the first place. Anarchists now must find
ways to maintain momentum and energy even through a total media blackout.

As the anarchist movement struggled to regain its footing throughout the year
following the 9/11 attacks, some tentative attempts were made to apply the mass
action model again, notably at the protests against the World Economic Forum in New
York City and then at the “People’s Strike” protests against the IMF in DC a year
after the terrorist attacks. These were admirable efforts, and if nothing else they
served to give those seriously committed to demonstration activism a way to stay
involved, but they showed that for the most part the large numbers and high morale
previously associated with large mobilizations were no longer available. Older
activists were demoralized, younger ones were unsure how to proceed, and people on
the fringes of activism and radical politics were too distracted by the spectator
sport of the so-called War on Terror to refocus on the struggle against capitalist
globalization on other fronts.

When the Terror War shifted into a new gear, demonstrations became popular again,
but anarchists were no longer in the forefront of the organizing. Liberal and
authoritarian groups attempted to appropriate all the mystique radicals had recently
given mass action, while only taking on the superficial aspects of the organizing
models that had made protests before 9/11 exciting, participatory, and thus
dangerous to the established order. The first two major demonstrations to protest
the impending war in Iraq, in DC on January 20 and then worldwide on February 15,
were dominated by liberal single-issue politics and models. The protests in New York
City on February 15 became a little more raucous when the police attempted to block
the march and rank-and-file protesters fought back, but for the most part
consciously radical militant tactics seemed a thing of the past at mass actions [4].
This was all the more disappointing in that the February 15 protests were perhaps
the most heavily attended protests in history; because militant activists had surrendered the
mass action context, millions of people marching in the streets neither helped to
sway the opinions of the masters of war nor to obstruct their preparations for
it—nor, for that matter, to build a movement capable of disarming them.

Things changed when the United States attacked Iraq on March 20, 2003. On this day,
and over the months that followed it, countless cities were struck by demonstrations
that went beyond the limits liberal organizers try to impose. San Francisco was
entirely paralyzed; more importantly, radical communities appeared in more
surprising locations such as Saint Louis, Missouri, conceiving and carrying out
their own disruptive actions as the militant core of the anti-war movement. A new
generation of activists, many of whom had not participated in the post-Seattle phase
of demonstration activism, gained experience during this time.

As that phase of the war in Iraq died down, activists also slowed the pace of their
activity, taking time to recover from such a demanding period of organizing.
Anarchists nationwide began to focus their attention on the Free Trade Area of the
Americas ministerial that was to take place in Miami the following November. Many
believed that, thanks to the new momentum generated in the anti-war movement, this
could be the first really effective, exciting demonstration against capitalist
globalization since September 11; some hoped this would be the triumphant return of
Seattle-style protest activism. Consultas were held around the country at which
plans were hashed out, posters were designed and distributed, groups disseminated
calls for various forms of action.

Unfortunately, Miami was a poorly chosen playing field for this grudge match. It was
the most militarized police state North America had ever seen: there were so many
police, equipped with so much destructive weaponry, that any kind of militant
confrontation would have been doomed to failure. The protestor turnout was bound to
be limited: the majority of potential participants were still distracted by the Iraq
war, not thinking about corporate globalization, and Miami was a great distance from
most active communities. Consequently, there wasn’t a wide range of diversity among
the protestors, which can otherwise temper police repression: this made it easy for
the police to pigeonhole protesters as either law-abiding union members or unruly
anarchists, so as to ignore the former and attack the latter.

These factors alone might not have spelled doom for the protests, but there were
also several strategic errors in the organizing. The plan organizers put forth, to
attack the fence surrounding the meetings, was exactly what the authorities expected
[5]—and while the latter were thoroughly prepared for this scenario, few activists
arrived mentally or physically equipped to undertake this. Even worse, certain
organizers cut an unbelievably foolish deal with the labor unions—which, it must be
noted, were closely collaborating with the police—to the effect that no direct
action would take place during the permitted union march on the afternoon of the
primary day of demonstrations. Thanks to this agreement, the police were free simply
to maintain order during the union march, with little fear of having to divide their
attention; then, as soon as the march was over, they steamrolled across the entire
city, beating, gassing, shooting, and arresting everyone who remained, confident that everyone they attacked was acting outside the law and therefore a safe target.
The only way anarchists could have turned the tables would have been by acting
unexpectedly and en masse outside the occupied district of Miami, but the
initiative necessary for that kind of autonomous, covert organizing was painfully
lacking. The consulta model, while it indicated an admirable commitment to
decentralized organizing, failed to provide intelligent strategic decisions,
adequate security for planning, or commitments on which participating groups
actually followed through. These may all have been incidental failures, but each
one cost dearly.

This is not to say nothing of value was accomplished in Miami. People still came
together and acted courageously, with all the benefits that entails, and the police
state was revealed for what it was, at least to eyewitnesses and through the few
venues that ran coverage of the events. But coming away from a protest with a
martyr’s tale of police violence and abuse, or, at best, a story of heroic narrow
escapes, is a poor second to actually feeling like one has struck blows and made
gains.

In the wake of what many felt to be a debacle, some anarchists began to emphasize
the importance of acting outside mass models in smaller, more autonomous groups with
the element of surprise. Some had been promoting this idea for a long time; it had
even been tested to some extent in mass actions, such as at the People’s Strike in
Washington, DC, September 2002, when the organizers distributed a list of targets
and intersections and announced that actions would take place throughout the city.
Others, notably environmental and animal liberation activists, had been acting in
clandestine cells for decades. So it happened that, as the election year approached,
the war in Iraq wore on, and political matters came back to the fore of public
attention, anarchists were preoccupied with the question of whether mass actions
could ever be effective again, and what forms of decentralized action might be able
to replace them.


Direct Action in the Election Year

The year 2004 was ushered in by a midnight march in downtown Washington, DC,
commemorating the ten year anniversary of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico.
More than one hundred masked anarchists bearing banners, torches, and percussion
instruments took over a major thoroughfare for a full hour, leaving spraypaint and
stencil designs in their wake. This march appeared as if out of nowhere in a crowded
business district, on a night when the police department was so overextended that it
took over a half hour for even one patrol car to show up. There were no arrests.
Clearly, some anarchists had learned the lessons of Miami, without withdrawing from
public actions altogether.

All the same, the first months of 2004 were quiet ones for direct action. March
20th, the anniversary of the declaration of war on Iraq, saw largely peaceful mass
demonstrations along the lines of those before the war, lacking the urgency and
militancy of the actions carried out during it. In April, there was another protest
in Washington, DC against the IMF and World Bank; the extent to which it was a
ritualized, placid affair revealed just how far anarchist attention had drifted from
the formerly prioritized terrain of mass actions opposing corporate globalization.
It was followed immediately by the March for Women’s Lives, a rally in support of
abortion rights that drew over a million people. Although there were hundreds of
anarchists present, if not more, the possibility that militant action of any kind
might take place was never broached. People of militant perspectives were still
coming together when liberal organizers solicited their participation, but without a
sense that it was feasible to organize events on their own terms.

This impression was sealed by the G8 summit in Georgia that June. The protests at
the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy in the summer of 2001 had been the high water mark of
the anti-globalization movement: hundreds of thousands of protesters had converged
on the city, engaging in tactics of all kinds that had left entire financial
districts in wreckage. Eager to avoid another such catastrophe, the powers that be
picked a secluded island off the coast of Georgia to host the G8 meeting in June of
2004, and set aside tens of millions of dollars for security. Not only the island
itself but much of the coastline around it was thoroughly militarized; as has become
customary, the media ran a series of articles demonizing predicted anarchist
protestors while emphasizing the invincibility of the police and military forces
that would be waiting for them.

Demoralized by the Miami experience, most advocates of direct action assumed from
the outset that nothing would be possible in Georgia. In retrospect, it was wise to
let the G8 summit pass rather than squandering the last optimism of the movement on
a doomed venture, though at the time this resignation seemed to be a troubling
symptom of general cynicism. Many brushed off mass actions as obsolete; in the end,
there was only one protestor for every sixty-seven security officers at the G8
summit. Much of the energy of those few who did take the trouble to go to Georgia
was invested in the “Fix Shit Up” campaign, in which anarchists provided volunteer
labor supporting disadvantaged families in the areas of police occupation. The name
of this venture, which could neither successfully solicit media coverage nor appeal
to liberal sympathies nor inspire the punk rockers whose slogan it referenced,
speaks volumes as to its long-term effectiveness as an insurrectionary strategy.
When no actual blows can be struck against the system that creates and enforces poverty,
anarchists should at least do what they can to alleviate its effects—but many
anarchists are already doing this where they live, and traveling long distances to
do so has all the disadvantages of traveling to carry out more militant actions
without most of the advantages. In every aspect, the G8 summit was the nadir of the
general slump through which mass action activism passed following 9/11,
notwithstanding the renaissance during the Iraq war.

Some had called for widespread autonomous actions around the country to coincide
with the G8 summit. A little-known example of one such call was the “Insurrection
Night” proposal, which was circulated via email listservs. In incendiary language,
it called for people everywhere to carry out militant, confrontational direct
actions the Saturday night preceding the week of the G8 summit. The advantages of
this approach over going to Georgia to get tear-gassed and arrested in the middle of
nowhere were obvious: it allowed radicals to plan their actions in familiar,
unguarded terrain and with the benefit of surprise. On the night so designated,
however, nothing happened—or if anything did, news of it was never circulated. If
all it took to get people to rise up and strike blows against the apparatus of
control was to issue a call to action, this revolution would have been over a long
time ago; and even if such calls were to work, it seems clear that the system can
survive a burning dumpster here and there—the problem is how to concentrate such blows, and strike
them in such a way that they give rise to wider uprisings. From this example, one
can surmise that both calls for autonomous action and autonomous actions themselves
must proceed from an already thriving culture of resistance if they are to offer
any results [6]—and neither, alone, are sufficient to give rise to such a culture.
If the G8 summit in Georgia was the nadir for mass action, the “Insurrection Night”
prototype represents the weakest version of the autonomous action model.

A few days after the proposed night of insurrection, on the final day of the G8
summit, activists in North Carolina shut down an entire corporate business district
with steel cables, smoke bombs, and banners decrying the G8 and corporate power in
general, causing a massive traffic jam in the center of the state. Local newspapers
and television gave this more coverage than they gave the protests in Georgia
against the G8 summit, and local residents experienced it far more immediately. This
took place only two days before a public outreach event, the “Really Really Free
Market,” in the state capital, at which people gathered to share resources and
entertainment freely. As a result of the direct action that preceded it, the police
and media both paid a great deal of attention to this event: the nightly news showed
hundreds of people happily dancing, eating, and exchanging gifts, while police
helicopters circled overhead and a hundred riot police waited nearby. Thus, this
combination of tactics resulted in free publicity for the effectiveness of covert action,
the munificence of community activism, and the heavy-handedness of the state. In
contrast to the “Insurrection Night” prototype, this can be seen as an effective
integration of autonomous action into a wider strategy for building radical
communities and gaining widespread attention.

Another example of effective autonomous action occurred a month later in Maine,
following an Earth First! gathering, when approximately 150 people converged on the
Governor’s Mansion to protest a proposed liquid natural gas pipeline. First, a few
activists erected a thirty-foot tripod with a protester locked atop it, blocking the
driveway. Once this was accomplished and all but the police liaison and the woman on
the tripod had escaped unseen, a small masked group arrived and took advantage of
the distraction occasioned by the tripod to dump hundreds of pounds of foul lobster
guts across the lawn. They disappeared as other protesters showed up with food,
games, and other festive forms of entertainment, further confusing the slowly
responding authorities. Two communiqués were delivered: one a serious one for the
mainstream media, the other a hilarious statement on behalf of the “lobster
liberation front” for activists and others with a sense of humor. The event helped
keep opposition to the pipeline visible, gave those opposing it more bargaining power, and
demonstrated an alternate model for autonomous actions.

The Maine action was organized in secrecy by a small circle of people who
nonetheless managed to open it up to great numbers of participants; in this regard,
it possessed many of the advantages of both the mass and autonomous action models.
As the target was three hours’ drive distant from the gathering at which
participants were recruited, and its identity was never openly revealed, the action
retained the element of surprise. At the gathering, two preparatory meetings were
held at which organizers described the general nature of the target and affinity
groups formed to focus on different aspects of the action. The morning of the
action, a caravan left the gathering; the bulk of the participants did not know
where they were going until they were led onto the site. This negated the risk of
informers being present.

This kind of organizing demands a careful balance of security and communication, for
those invited must learn enough about the action to be excited about participating
and equipped to do so effectively. This model requires a large number of people to
place a high level of trust in a few individuals; thus, it often works best in
tight-knit or culturally homogeneous communities. While it is not as accessible to
broad ranges of people as the mass action model, it is more participatory than other
forms of autonomous action, offering introductory roles for less experienced
activists.

The events in North Carolina and Maine were only two of several local actions in
mid-2004; but for radical activists and well-behaved citizens alike, the central
political events of the summer were the Democratic and Republican National
Conventions. At these, the possibilities and limitations of the anarchist movement’s
preoccupation with autonomous actions were tested.

The Democratic National Convention took place in Boston at the end of July. It was
not heavily attended by radicals; many were saving their time and energy for the
Republican National Convention. Regardless of theoretical matters such as whether
anti-authoritarians should focus on contesting the most powerful political party or
all political parties, activists laying plans for mass actions must take into
account practical questions such as how many people will actually show up. Perhaps
if thousands of anarchists had converged on Boston to show their opposition to the
false alternative represented by the Democratic Party, it would have made an
important point, but this was not to be. As many learned in Miami, anarchists must
always devise strategies that take into account the number of participants an event
will draw and how much militancy can realistically be expected of them.

To get perspective on the protests at the Democratic National Convention, we can
compare and contrast them with the People’s Strike protests against the
International Monetary Fund in DC September 2002, with which they shared many
features. Both protests were less attended than organizers hoped; both included
calls for autonomous action, as well as organizing for more centralized, accessible
events; both took place in cities that are known for having police that show
restraint during protests. At each event, the main day of action featured a critical
mass bicycle parade, a march, and decentralized actions around the periphery. Both
protests were organized by explicitly anti-authoritarian groups that made media
coverage an integral part of their strategy.

The organizers of the People’s Strike had emphasized the confrontational character
of their action, declaring explicitly that the city would be shut down; the
unapologetically militant tone of their rhetoric was one of the most salient
features of that mobilization. Although it turned out that not enough militants, and
not militant enough ones at that, turned out to follow through on this threat, the
media and police accomplished it themselves by spreading hysteria in advance and
clogging up the city in their attempts to defend it. After most of the actions
planned had been accomplished, the police, still unnerved and always most likely to
go after defenseless sitting targets, mass-arrested everyone present at a
non-confrontational action in Pershing Park. This mass arrest, though somewhat
inconvenient at the time, proved to be the most important legacy of the action: it
ensured international media coverage for the protest, made the police look absurd,
and ensnared the city i
n lawsuits that kept the demonstration in the news for years afterwards and forced
the police to be more hesitant to make arrests during future protests.

By contrast, in Boston, the organizers—the “Bl(A)ck Tea Society”—were careful to
distance themselves from violence, striving to offset the media campaign of extreme
misinformation about anarchists that had become typical by that time [7].
Presumably, they hoped that by doing so they could attract more participants;
unfortunately, as the prevailing sentiment in liberal circles was that getting
“anybody but Bush” elected president was the first priority, participation in
protests against the Democratic Party was bound to be limited to radicals. The
Boston organizers were also kept on edge by a campaign of police and FBI
intimidation, but this never panned out into the raids and arrests they feared. The
fact that there were so few arrests in Boston indicates that, however intimidating
the police made certain to be before and during the event, they themselves hoped to
avoid illegal raids and mass arrests that would draw more attention to the protests.
Had the organizers figured this out in advance, they could have strategized accordingly.

Following the People’s Strike model, the organizers in Boston distributed a list of
targets throughout the city suitable for autonomous action. However, in preparing
the People’s Strike, the organizers had also covertly coordinated many actions, so
as to be sure that something would happen—consequently, there were freeways shut
down by burning tires, bank windows smashed, locks glued, and a major avenue
barricaded by a giant inflatable, though many of these actions went unnoticed by the
media or other activists because they took place over such a broad area. In Boston,
the organizers don’t seem to have been as proactive, and neither, apparently, were
many of the other activists who came to the protest—the most militant action of the
event seems to have been an incident in which a dozen people turned over shelves in
a Gap clothing store, leaving spraypaint in their wake.

Just as the “Insurrection Night” model failed to yield results, simply distributing
a list of targets is hardly sufficient to enable militant action to occur. If they
hope to see militant autonomous actions carried out to the extent that mass actions
have been in the past, organizers must provide some of the prerequisites that enable
people to apply militant tactics in the latter context. These include crowd cover,
communications and scouting, media attention, and, above all, the reassurance that
somebody somewhere has actually invested energy in making sure something will
happen. The Bl(A)ck Tea Society attracted the necessary media attention; they
provided a text messaging communications system, though it proved vulnerable to
police surveillance, resulting in a few arrests after a botched attempt to assemble
following the “Really Really Democratic Bazaar”; they seemed to have done little
else to facilitate autonomous actions. This is not to disparage their organizing
efforts—in addition to media and outreach work, they also organized a convergence center,
prepared legal infrastructure, and staged a variant on the Really Really Free
Market model that attracted thousands of participants. But if autonomous action is
to rival mass action as a model for militant activity, anarchists have to learn
that the “clap your hands if you believe in Tinkerbelle” approach, in which
organizers call for decentralized actions and then cross their fingers and hope an
army of maniacs will show up to plan and execute them, does not produce results.

The Democratic National Convention was not an opportune setting for a doomsday
showdown with the forces of law and order, and it’s important that a movement
limited in numbers and experience not overextend itself. Perhaps anarchists should
have concentrated all their energy on accessible, non-confrontational approaches in
Boston; it certainly doesn’t pay to make empty threats too many times. If effective
militant action of any kind was to happen there, given the massive police presence
and small numbers of protesters, it would have had to have been decentralized and
autonomous: twenty such actions as happened at the Gap, for example, could have
caught the police by surprise, generated media attention, and raised morale in
anticipation of the Republican National Convention. Failing that, it would have been
more sensible to focus on more outreach and community-building, in which the Boston
protests were already superior to the People’s Strike. In trying to have it both
ways by calling for militant action while neither preparing it nor tricking the police into
making it unnecessary, the organizers played into the hands of the authorities, who
hoped to show that they could easily thwart anarchist attempts at disruption. This
had negative consequences for Boston locals as well as the anarchist movement.
While the long-term effects of the “People’s Strike” were that local police became
more hesitant in dealing with crowds, the millions of dollars of funding that the
Boston police received to prepare for the convention paid for an arsenal of
semi-lethal weapons—one of which was used to kill a woman during a post-game sports
riot a few months later.

A month after the protests in Boston, the Republican National Convention was held in
New York City. Unlike every other demonstration since the invasion of Iraq, this was
a historic opportunity for anarchists to apply the mass action model effectively.
All the necessary pieces were in place: the local populace was furious with the
Republicans for invading their city, and enthusiastically supportive of the
protesters; radicals were coming by the thousands from all around the country,
hoping this would be the event of a lifetime; and there was to be a wide range of
people involved in the protests and a great deal of media attention focused on them,
both of which would help deter the police from a violent crackdown such as the one
in Miami the preceding year. The attention of the whole world was concentrated on
New York City, and while many liberals feared that a serious confrontation there
would undermine the chances of the Democratic Party’s presidential hopeful,
countless others longed for one.

If all that wasn’t enough, there was a struggle going on between the liberal
organizers and the city police department as to whether the giant permitted march
would be allowed to go to Central Park. This was the same situation that had
precipitated the street confrontations during the anti-war protests in New York a
year and a half earlier; if the city was unable to reach an agreement with the
organizers in time, everyone knew that the march could turn violent. The leaders of
the liberal organizing coalition backed down on their demands on one occasion, only
to be forced by their grassroots membership to reinstate them. This conflict
provided a perfect opportunity for anarchist organizing. A nationwide call for a
black bloc on the day of the main permitted march would have taken perfect advantage
of this conflict, giving those frustrated with the city government and its liberal
accomplices a rallying point. Had the first major day of protests ended in
streetfighting, it would have changed the entire character of the protests and perhaps of opposition to the
Bush regime in general. The very last thing the police department of New York City
wanted was to have to use tear gas in the crowded streets of the most populated
city in North America; this would have been a public relations debacle for both
the city government and the Republican Party, and it would have shown that
anarchists could pose a real threat to the imposed domestic peace that enables
wars overseas. Even if this had resulted in massive numbers of arrests, it could
have been worth it—hundreds, if not more, of the anarchists who went to New York
ended up getting arrested, anyway.

Alas, anarchists were so caught up in solving strategic problems from past actions
that they failed to apprehend these possibilities. While a heavier focus on
autonomous actions would have been the only hope of enabling effective militant
tactics at the demonstrations in Miami and Boston, New York was a perfect setting
for a large-scale, centrally organized strategy, and anarchists passed this chance
up in favor of a focus on decentralized, autonomous actions. Perhaps older activists
were still shell-shocked from the protests at the Republican National Convention in
2000, at which a poorly planned mass action had ended in a lot of pointless,
demoralizing arrests; perhaps it was just too difficult to coordinate actions
centrally between groups from around the world in such an enormous and complicated
city; perhaps it really was the legacy of Miami frightening anarchists out of using
their heads. Regardless, as the communiqué delivered weeks before the demonstrations
by the NYC Anarchist Grapevine admitted, there was no “Big Plan” for militant action in New
York.

Unfortunately, what anarchists fail to coordinate themselves will be coordinated by
authoritarians, and so, while anarchist labor was central to the infrastructure that
enabled them, the character of most of the actions planned for New York was
non-confrontational, even liberal. At the last minute, the organizers of the main
march finally accepted the conditions of the city, agreeing to march in circles
rather than follow through on the desires of the rank-and-file who wanted to go to
Central Park with or without a permit; likewise, though anarchists and militants
swelled the numbers of many other actions, these were largely orchestrated to avoid
actually challenging the activities of the Republicans or the occupation of the
city.

To be fair, some anarchists, notably including many who had traveled from San
Francisco and other parts of the West Coast, organized a day of direct action late
in the protests, but they focused only on enabling symbolic tactics of civil
disobedience. Worse, they made exactly the same mistake that had been made in Miami
and at the Republican National Convention four years earlier: they arranged for
their action not to coincide with any others and to take place after most of the
less radical protesters had left the city, so the police had free hands to focus on
repressing everyone on the streets that night. This resulted in over one thousand
arrests, without any concrete objective being accomplished besides the news coverage
these attracted and the harassment of some Republican delegates.

One of the most important lessons that can be drawn from the aforementioned action
is the importance of different kinds of actions taking place simultaneously. In
Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa, legal marches, civil disobedience, and confrontational
militant action all took place at once, and the division of the city into zones
according to level of risk made it possible for protesters to pick the form of
engagement with which they were most comfortable. In the Republican National
Conventions of both 2000 and 2004, as well as the FTAA protests in Miami, organizers
did exactly the opposite, senselessly endangering those committed to militant action
and undercutting the effectiveness of the protests as a whole. The costs of this
could have been offset had militants organized a major mass action themselves, but
none dared do so.

In the absence of a unified approach, the hundreds of different actions that took
place in New York never quite added up to the insurrection they could have. As a
demonstration of the possibilities of localized autonomous action, New York was
unparalleled, but it was also a missed opportunity in an era that provides few good
chances to apply the mass action model.

Two groups did attempt to organize actions on the day of the main march; ironically,
one applied the mass action model as if carrying out an autonomous action, while the
other did exactly the opposite. The former of these groups was a militant
contingent, apparently organized by word of mouth, that took part in the main
permitted march; this might be the first case on record of a black bloc going
undercover by mixing with civilian protesters and leaving their faces uncovered
until the moment before the action. When this group approached the point at which
the march turned around to march away from Central Park, right in front of the
building hosting the convention center, an enormous green dragon puppet was set
afire, and streetfighting broke out; however, there were not enough numbers or
preparation to maintain this. Within an hour, the police had reestablished control
and the march proceeded as before; only a few impressive photographs of the fire
remained, one of which ran in one especially poorly informed tabloid with a caption describing it as the work
of “the anarchist group ‘Black Box’.” [8]

The other notable militant effort that day was a call for anarchists to intercept
Republican delegates on their way to their evening’s entertainment at several
Broadway shows. However, because this call was promoted in such venues as the New
York Times, these actions lacked the element of surprise, the most important aspect
of the autonomous action model. Many anarchists showed up, but as there was no
strategy for mass action and few participants brought individual plans of their own,
there were many arrests and little more was accomplished than a few delegates being
shouted at.

Whatever strategic miscalculations anarchists may have made, it was still thrilling
to be in New York with so many others determined to change the course of history.
The Critical Mass bicycle parade, which took place before most of the other events,
offered a moving illustration of just how many people and how much energy were
gathered together that week; to stand at a corner and watch groups of thirty and
forty surge constantly past for a full half hour was simply breathtaking. Most who
went to New York left with new energy and inspiration, which helped to catalyze
further action as the elections drew near.

The election provided a matchless opportunity for nationwide autonomous actions.
Unlike any summit or local issue, it happened everywhere at once, focusing public
attention on a wide range of issues that could be addressed on a variety of fronts.
Among others, a nationwide campaign on the theme “Don’t (Just) Vote, Get Active”
urged people to take action on election day to demonstrate all the possibilities for
political engagement beyond the voting booth [9].

The diversity and scope of the actions anarchists carried out around the election
make it worth recounting some of them here. In Washington, DC, fifteen polling
stations were decorated the night before election day with a stencil design fifteen
feet long and four feet high reading “Our dreams will never fit in their ballot
boxes.” In Baltimore, the following afternoon, a Reclaim the Streets action on the
same theme attracted sixty people.

In Portland, Oregon, one thousand people struggled with police to march through the
streets. A “Don’t Just Vote, Take Action” march of two hundred people in Tucson,
Arizona was attacked by police employing pepper bullets. A spontaneous march of
almost two hundred people in downtown Philadelphia blocked a major bridge to New
Jersey; everyone escaped arrest except a reporter from a local television news
station who was inexplicably attacked by police while marchers chanted “We don’t
need no water, let the motherfucker burn!” In New Orleans, a radical Day of the Dead
march featuring a marching band, seventy-five skeletons, and an alter screamed and
moaned its way through the French Quarter to the riverfront, at which the alter was
filled with remembrances of deceased loved ones and then set afire as a naked
attendant swam it out to sea; on the return route, participants dragged newspaper
boxes and garbage cans into the streets and smashed the window of a stretch-SUV
deemed too revolting to ignore.

During Chicago’s “Don’t Just Vote Week of Resistance,” which included several
demonstrations and other events, police tried and failed to prevent over one
thousand people from taking the streets in a massive unpermitted march. At another
incident in Chicago, a rock was thrown through the window of a GOP office in which
Republicans were gathered to watch election results, sending glass flying all over
the room. Large rocks were also thrown through the windows of the Republican
headquarters in downtown Buffalo, New York and a nearby army recruiting center, and
the local news station received a letter claiming responsibility.

In Red Hook, New York, 250 Bard college students shut down an intersection in the
center of town for almost an hour until police forcibly dispersed them. In northern
Los Angeles county, a group carried out what they suggested might be the first
banner drop in their area, with a banner on the “Don’t (Just) Vote” theme reading
“Workers: Which Millionaire Will You Vote For?” In Vermillion, South Dakota, a town
of only 10,000 residents, fifty people maintained a presence outside a voting booth,
stretching a volleyball net to bear a variety of signs, sharing food, and inviting
all with grudges of their own against the system to join them. The same town was to
host another such demonstration two and a half months later on the day of the
Inauguration, attracting media coverage from as far away as San Diego, CA.

The day after the election, a march in downtown Washington, DC on the theme “No
Matter, Who Won, The System Is Rotten” attracted one hundred people. Equipped with a
powerful sound system, it snaked through the streets, disruptive and rowdy, evading
police repression. In San Francisco, five thousand people marched against Bush;
afterwards, a breakaway group built a bonfire out of US flags and an effigy of Bush,
then marched through the city pulling urban debris and newspaper boxes into the
street and smashing the windows of two banks. In San Diego, fliers posted the
preceding night on UCSD campus reading “Where’s the Riot?” attracted one hundred
people to an impromptu forum as to what forms resistance could take next. When the
question “Who’s willing to get arrested today?” was broached, many raised their
hands.

Two days later, in perhaps the most militant participatory action of the week, a
surprise march of over one hundred people bearing torches, drums, anarchist banners,
and a two-headed effigy of Bush and Kerry took over downtown Raleigh, North
Carolina, decorating the streets with graffiti and destroying bank machines until it
reached the state headquarters of the Republican Party. The windows of the building
were smashed, its walls were covered in spraypaint, fireworks were set off inside,
and the effigy was set afire in the front yard. The following day, over fifty-eight
major media outlets ran a story covering the event, in which the state GOP chief of
staff was quoted as saying that campaign offices and party headquarters were being
vandalized throughout the nation. “They have a right to disagree,” he pleaded, “but
to do it agreeably.”

The following night, yet another spontaneous march occurred in Washington, DC,
leaving spraypaint in its wake and meeting with enthusiasm from locals. From one
side of the country to the other, by day and by night, militants were carrying out
actions that demonstrated the seriousness of their discontent and invited others to
express their own. This was the autonomous action model, which had evolved over the
preceding year, finally being used to effect in circumstances for which it was
appropriate.

Ironically, as the Inauguration approached in January of 2005, it was activists from
New York City that insisted protests be organized on the mass action model and
called for a massive anti-authoritarian march, while others called for autonomous
actions. This time, both were right, and it was only tactical errors, not errors in
strategy, that prevented the protests from shutting down the spectacle. Presidential
inaugurations provide a rare opportunity for centrally-organized anarchist mass
actions: they can attract large numbers of anti-authoritarians, they offer an
obvious target, and the risk of arrests and police brutality are forestalled by the
presence of diverse crowds and media and the desire of the authorities to maintain
the illusion that everyone is pleased with the ruler being sworn in. At this
particular inauguration, the ongoing legacy of the mass arrests of the People’s
Strike a full two and a half years earlier also served to tie the hands of the
police. At the same time, Washington, DC, being the nation’s capital, provides an excellent field
for autonomous actions, which could only serve to heighten tensions, distract and
confuse the police, and emphasize popular discontent.

The massive anarchist march was wisely planned to coincide with the other protests
of the day, so as to benefit from the crowd cover they provided and the divided
attention of the police. Hundreds of people participated in the march, even though,
as a result of some strange misunderstanding or internal conflict, it left the
convergence point early, before many would-be participants had even arrived. At the
previous inauguration, a black bloc had successfully broken through one of the
checkpoints surrounding the parade route, and the organizers planned to repeat this
feat and go on to block the route. This was the major tactical error that prevented
the march from being really effective: a basic rule of thumb in planning for an
action is not to count on being able to repeat the past. Had the organizers prepared
a back-up plan, such as a way to maintain the coherence of the bloc if it could not
penetrate police lines and a secondary target outside the immediate zone of police control, it would not have been such a misfortune that the police blocked the path
of the march before it arrived at a checkpoint. As it was, having no backup plan,
the march bogged down at this point, and broke up; a smaller company of anarchists
regrouped and succeeded in reaching and charging a checkpoint, but lacked the
numbers and equipment to break through.

Other problems afflicting the march included an apparent loss of contact with the
scouting team and poor internal communication dynamics that led many to accuse one
participating group of hijacking the march. Aside from these, the fact that the
march did not succeed in its professed objective can be attributed to the hesitance
with which most participants approached it, as it was the first militant mass action
of its size since Miami. There were enough people there to break through the police
lines, had more of them been ready to put their all into it; next time, assured by
that experience that mass actions are indeed still possible in the post-9/11 world,
perhaps activists will arrive better equipped and more psychologically prepared.
Speaking of equipment, it’s worth pointing out that the black bloc that broke
through the checkpoint in 2000 used an appropriated industrial wheelbarrow to
spearhead their charge, while the march at the 2004 inauguration had only a banner
reinforced with PVC pipe. PVC pipe is notoriously fragile, and has failed militant
marches several times now; the beginning convergence point was so free from police
control that participants could have brought in massive wooden shields and other
fortifications, which would have served much better in the ensuing mêlée. Likewise,
the march passed several construction sites that less hesitant militants would have
raided for materials.

Just when it seemed the day’s events were over, the crowd leaving a packed show by punk band Anti-Flag filled the street in a surprise march of hundreds. Bearing torches, drums, anarchist banners, spray-paint cans, and shopping carts full of useful materials, the throng marched through Adams Morgan, an ethnic neighborhood suf