Stop Block Cop City!

From: Berkman School of Anarchy

Tire fire barricade at the AirBnBs! Throw a molotov at the PowerPoint Presentations! Dump a smelly bucket of shrimp on the peaceful protest! We’re going to Stop Block Cop City!!

Why?

Because I’m mad that they wasted my time with their awful presentation/book-report/thinly-veiled-business-management-double-speak that tried to sell me and a bunch of other anarchists a program of non-violent civil disobedience to stop the police training facility from being constructed in the Old Prison Farm.

I had to sit through:

  1. Being told about the history of the movement in a few awful slides…know your fucking audience.

  2. Being told not only about affinity groups (again, know your audience), but also to FORM an affinity group with the randos sitting around me. Not only is this fucking dangerous (are the people around me feds? I don’t fucking know), but it is a COMPLETE MISUNDERSTANDING of what an affinity group is, which is a tightly knit group of people who are basically an extended family willing to do shit together.

  3. Being told that the way forward is civil disobedience because it is going to cause a “political crisis” for Andre Dickens. First of all, anarchists don’t want political solutions. We want to destroy the political. Second, this ignores the fact that the Atlanta liberals, along with the conservative governor Kemp, as well as the feds, all get a political win by beating up on people who are against the police. We are not on the verge of a “political crisis”. Even if you believe in the oxymoron of “political win”, this political approach failed miserably with the Beg the City Council movement and its 17 hours of testimony to not approve a couple more million for construction, and will fail miserably with the referendum.

  4. Being told that people won’t get arrested. The whole fucking purpose of NVDA is to get arrested and become part of the spectacle. Participating in spectacularization and representational politics can only undermine desire and initiative. Even if this NVDA completely shuts down construction, the means and methods used to “win” are a loss, because they legitimize existing government processes, and government more broadly.

  5. Being told to imagine a strategy for invading the forest as if there were no cops there, from people who have probably never been to the forest. How can an “affinity group”, formed in 1 minute, of people who have never been to the forest, come up with a strategy for invading the forest? They absolutely can’t. This is just an idiotic story-telling device that treats anarchists like children who get excited by play-imagining that they are generals of a fucking army.

  6. Being told that decisions will be made by a spokescouncil of affinity groups and ALSO that there’s a detailed plan with contingencies. Aside from the fact that anarchists are very familiar with the shortcomings of spokescouncils (Why don’t affinity groups just self-organize? What if they don’t agree with the other affinity groups? Is there going to be some top-down process for resolution?), it is IMPOSSIBLE for the spokescouncil to have any initiative and ALSO for the organizers to have a detailed plan with contingencies. As was the case during the forest occupation, the “organizers” have a plan and want people to agree to it, and they are using their business-management tactics from their work lives to get “buy-in” from all the “stakeholders” (anarchists conjoined with liberals, non-profits, christ-cucks, etc.). They are masters of charisma, making everyone in their “compositional” structure, all the groups of people who fundamentally disagree, play nice by making them feel like they’ve contributed to the planning and execution of a fait accompli, when really the decisions were made behind closed doors by the business-managementites in their nights-and-weekends off time from being on Zoom calls for their business-management jobs or running their pizza shops or maintaining their “commune” mortgages or taking credit for the work of others as long as it doesn’t tarnish their reputation. There is a double duplicity, of not giving a shit about anyone’s input on the NVDA, but also hoping for some VDA from the anarchist shock troops. Fuck that!

  7. Being told to imagine that there will be re-enactments of this glorious action in the future and how amazing it would be to say “I was there.” First of all, the only corny-ass-motherfuckers who do reenactments are Confederate sympathizers who want to replay the Civil War THAT THEY LOST. Nobody else does that corny shit, not even MLK NVDA cucks. Second, this asks anarchists to act as if there’s some clear cut victory that can happen, after which we can go back to our jobs and Netflix and feel good about ourselves. No way. We’re always walking toward anarchy, it is a method not a destination, and we celebrate life and adventure, not false victories that are just veiled collaboration with the government. Third, I can’t imagine a better way of destroying initiative and desire than to have anarchists prospectively wax nostalgic about a false victory organized from on high. The anticipation of the dopamine hit is meant to get people addicted to such tasty morsels of easy wins and easy living. It’s a fundamentally salvationist psychology, trying to bring to mind a heaven on earth, a holy land, a rapture if one only participates. But that’s the populist organizer’s way: if you can sneak in some satisfaction of religious desires to motivate people toward your aims, why not?

So “Oh fuck yeah, spread it” To Our Friends; this is a Call to Stop Block Cop City! Or whatever, do whatever the fuck you want. If you wanna be the foot soldiers for the-Program-that-is-Not-a-Program, so be it. But I sure as hell won’t see you at the AA meeting a year from now. And yes, I’m bitter about not being in the polycule.

References

https://scenes.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/04/every-compromise-in-defense-of-mother-earth-an-anarchist-critique-of-block-cop-citys-nonviolence-proposal/

There are 79 Comments

At mine it was very different. They said to be violent. Very violent.

It was kinda great! I was able to take some notes. Here's what the guy said:

“The ending of the existing social order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can be accomplished only by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of our committee, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labor for everyone.

The committee, as soon as the present institutions have been overthrown, proclaims that everything is common property, orders the setting up of workers' societies (artels) and at the same time publishes statistical tables compiled by experts and pointing out what branches of labour are most needed in a certain locality and what branches may run into difficulties there.

For a certain number of days assigned for the revolutionary upheaval and the disorders that are bound to follow, each person must join one or another of these artels according to his own choice... All those who remain isolated and unattached to workers' groups without sufficient reason will have no right of access either to the communal eating places or to the communal dormitories, or to any other buildings assigned to meet the various needs of the brother-workers or that contain the goods and materials, the victuals or tools reserved for all members of the established workers' society; in a word, he who without sufficient reason has not joined an artel, will be left without means of subsistence. All the roads, all the means of communication will be closed to him; he will have no other alternative but work or death.”

Wow, it really moved me!

they did one like this at the anarchist book fair in oakland and got heckled pretty good. then did another one sponsored by the dsa at uc berkeley which im guessing was a much more welcoming audience to their proposal.

the hecklers literally got responded to point-by-point and were humiliated as the crowd cheered on the anarchist presenters.

Did you notice that 3 quarters of the crowd(probably close to like a hundred or so people) left, alot of people came up and thanked me personally for pointing out the liberalism, shit plan, dangerous rhetoric and lies, and revisionist history. The revisionist history went as far as to rfer to slavery as "plantation agriculture", and to call the occupation an "arts and cultural space".

I do wonder what people are going to do if I someone shows up and start throwing projectiles at the police and spraypainting journalists camera lenses.
The answer that the Oakland presenters gave was "We are going to meet as spokescouncils beforehand and make agreements", which is fucking ridiculous.
Are you going to be protest police? What you're doing is encouraging protest police.

W e were both in the audience but we weren't in the same city. Still I know that we saw the same thing. They said it was unlikely that people will be arrested, and when someone asked them what their plan was if some unexpected arson happened during their NVDA their answer was, "we'd be really disappointed." Meanwhile that's literally what has happened during every fucking 'week of action'. That is what landed all the 'outside agitators' in jail with DT charges and without bail. This has been happening for almost a year now, and they've been happy to take credit for the media victories while blaming the failures on 'outside agitators'.

The social media for Stop Cop City is also putting out a call for a 'week of action' that overlaps with their NVDA. There are "Block Cop City"-branded Instagram accounts that literally tell people to "find a camping spot" and "dress for the protest" and yet these presenters are out here telling people in person that they won't be arrested.

I think anyone who chooses to enter a forest to 'find a camping spot' where a climate activist was killed takes responsibility for their own life. But I don't trust anyone in this thread who calls anyone criticizing this propaganda "out-of-state individualists" and "cops". But you already knew this, which is why you caught my eye. Find my number scrawled on the bathroom wall in the punk bar (Signal only).

the other weeks of action (except for the first two, when it was still a very small movement) were surrounded by months of sabotage and action around the country. why is there no more? it's mostly stopped. you cant even possibly compare the situation to the past because the only people doing shit now are like the canvassers and university students (who are still organizing rallies and marches on campus full steam ahead).

you put scare quotes around "outside agitators" as if you are responding to someone, but you arent. the point of that other commenter, which i know you can use that little noggin of yours to comprehend, is not that there is a problem with out of town participation. it is that almost no local anarchists have these same positions as you. your position, the "anarchist" position from whatever place you live, is almost exactly identical to the liberal position in atlanta. regularly, the kinds of "anarchists" that have participated in the movement share many things in common with atlanta liberals and they have to be painstakingly convinced of the need for real actions and risks. and thats worked so far. and its been awesome.

as for the IG account you linked from nashville, tennessee, i dont know what they have really to do with the action but i share your concerns on that

Straight up cop shit. You have a thin-as-fuck idea of anarchy if you can only accept people doing what you want them to do. And then if they want to resist the state in a way you don't like, you dream of molotoving them or disrupting their talks. Disgusting.

lol lighten up dude, i'm pretty sure it's a joke (although not as much of a joke as this presentation lmao)

There's only one way to do the Rev and that's ultra ultra ultra violence. That and teaching people to box.

You forgot the shrimp, dude, the shrimp is the most important part!

This was for sure written by a 15 year old hopped on too much prime energy drink lol

If young people weren't such faggot crack addicts they'd be doing some real shit like crawling toward the cops in their underwear under the direction of crypto-maoists. But they are crack addicts, and instead want to blow shit up. Smdh

This comment was for sure written by a 30-ish year old hopped on too many lattes..

But I was drinking Monster, the chosen drink of true Anarchists around the world, OBVIOUSLY, when I tagged this report back on the dumpster behind the Dennys on main street in my suburban neighborhood at 3am. Stay mad!

I know the standards for what ends up on this site are near rock bottom, but why is this garbage here? It's basically a shit talking screed passed off under a thin veneer of critique. I might even agree with the sentiment they're trying to express here, but damn this reads like the inside of a middle school bathroom stall.

Tsk tsk anews collective. This isn't up to the peer reviewed editorial standards of Anarchy. All submissions should be reviewed by the authors of Tiqqun first and scored on both originality in contribution to Anarchy and intellectual rigor. This wouldn't even be worth a mention in a humanities professor's tenure case. And if it's not valid currency in the academic realm, it's anarcho-trash.

what's up with y'all's weird ass fixation on a hyper marginal French academic journal that's been out of print for more than two decades?

LMAO, yes, Tiqqun is 'hyper-marginal' and no one is reading it. Let's get you back to bed, grandma

We were drunk on our own hubris, delighting in the chaos we had sown by posting this lightly-inflammatory reportback on an event that some had actually experienced IRL, when we were stopped dead in our tracks by your sobering critique. We cower and plead to the academic Gods! Please, our funding depends on being recognized as worthy and as having paid proper penance to the True Anarchists before us. O, show us the way, Anon!

Good job anews collective! It's about time people started to call this shit out. I'm tired of hearing it. It was pretty hilarious when they gave this talk in my city and tried to convince a room full of anarchists that probably no one would get arrested and probably no one would get shot, because it would be 'a political crisis'. Really kind of sad. Fortunately the anarchists present are not stupid and can see through the great lengths these organizers will go through to try to sway public opinion.

Flattery will get you everywhere!
UwU

this is the *exact* argument of the Atlanta-area liberals.

Atlanta liberals and out-of-state individualist anarchists have the same exact argument and have for the last 2.5 years of the movement on literally every single turning point and stage of the struggle.

Nothing says "anarchy" like a handful of out-of-state know-it-alls telling local people how to fight the correct way.

and I thought Dickens and the cops were getting only ones throwing around the outside agitator meme. guess it's useful when convenient. Typical tiqqunist expediency

those outside outside agitators. Anarchy means stfu and don't make fun of our stupid ideas

OMG did you *actually* just accuse people who disagree with you of being "liberals" and "outside agitators"? You "Atlanta" "anarchists" are too fucking much lol

the One True Form of Anarchism must be observed. All non-conformists will be firebombed or shot. This is Anarchism. Enemies of the Anarch will be handled in unrelenting fashion. There can be no debate on this issue. Concluded.

In Anarchy things worthy of being trolled shall not be trolled.

Go back to your pathetic land project cult where your stupid ideas are insulated from well-deserved ridicule

When the salamander school was burned down that was honestly pretty awesome.

Lol you say it's nazi shit?

Wild insane thing to say.
Anyways, for everyone ELSE. Here is why people burned down the salamander school. LINK

yeah but its full of half-truths and total lies, that is the issue. like almost every single paragraph has a very serious half-truth or lie within it :/

damn normally we try to coordinate our decompositional directives to coincide with state terrorism and raids and shit, who missed the memo? keep this shit saved until there are more arrests!

The insinuations by organizers that all the anarchists criticizing their master plan are coordinated and in league with state forces are getting increasingly desperate and pathetic.

INB4:
Next up they're going to call people antisemetic again

Get a fucking grip you manipulative, shady, assholes.

yeah, it's a lot sadder than that... most of these anarchists don't even notice when they're uncritically repeating counterinsurgency narratives because their own politics are incoherent and revolve around radical sanctimony

If it's that sad it's better to cry and let it all out anarchically!

so this is some obnoxious, petty snark. running a damned clinic on bad faith arguing, like that definition of affinity group?

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE, we know affinity groups can have different levels of quality

but then i clicked on this link from the source? https://berkmananarchy.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/21/the-illegalist-number/

kid is hilarious! probably unbearable to be around for 5 minutes but funny!

Blame anews mods for promoting this shit

unbearable cunts saying shit that people don't like! how dare those anarchists!! and using HUMOR to criticize to boot!? blasphemous. the only thing allowable in anarchist spaces are French Tomes and sad nodding to our inevitable fate spelled out by the Organizers.

get back in line. shut the fuck up. go to the NVDA. get arrested. get jail. thank the Organizers and support them when they run for city council or whatever their next idiotic "we've-exhausted-all-other-options"-scheme is.

You seem upset

For such a smug troll post, you seem really pressed to lash out at anyone who pokes fun back. Literally every counter-trolling comment gets a response within 15 minutes of being posted lol.

No u!

huh, it's almost as if one were looking in the mirror and don't like what they see.

control. the. narrative. must. control. the. narrative.

Imagine if the peepee poopoo upset bros got off their asses and did half the things their cringe screeds said they was gonna do. Maybe then we could have a little fun. The only thing worse than a NVDA strugglismo is a peepee poopoo screed blogger. NVNA?

prove your valor, as you ask others to do, by locking down to the north gate. we're all waiting. or is it that you just want other people to get arrested?

Different anon here. You do realise you're reinforcing their point, right?

Are you implying that there's something more valuable that can be done with one's time than being a hater? I can think of no higher calling than pee-pee-poo-pooing petty fools on anews comments who, ironically, ALSO seem to be spending their time talking shit, but must appear to "the public" -- because that's what they care about and are commenting on -- to be above it all, only focused on high-minded doing-the-rev as Important Organizers.

That's exactly the point of the piece: Fuck their directives. We'll do what we want. They're just funny fucking fools with their corny-ass action.

"We'll do what we want."

Therein lies the humour. They do absolutely nothing. Yet, they find themselves engorged with ressentiment and take to their blogs to berate others who are doing things, but not they way they'd do it, if they were to actually do anything.

Ad infinitum.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of seething ferocious keyboard typing as a form of protest, but you've convinced me.

idgi, i know yall are all too much of losers to know, but why not just accept this is all part of the vibe shift and indiesleeze moment playing out in the directionless and empty radical scenes. The return of twee indie music and parties and shitty DJs making dance punk, NVDA anti-globo convergences and shit. Just organize secret meetings and do something insane. dont cry about it on the internet, dont pretend to care about putting people in danger (this is a pathetic talking point for anyone who's taken part in a black bloc), or disrupt organizing presentations. Thats weak and makes sure nothing will happen.

I don't care about putting people in danger, but I atleast put people in danger in far cooler ways.

I hope that the NVDA bullshit doesn't happen.
I wish none of the city council bullshit ever happened.
I wish journalists weren't there for March 5th (submedia and unicorn riot I'm talking about you the most)

Stop wasting fucking time on bullshit politics and wasting others on revisionist compositional narratives.

I wish that the bullshit presentations and marketing garbage that went on tour when the encampment was active was disrupted like this. Those narratives brought liberal acab-ists when people needed insane feral anarchists.

Energy would be better off supporting and promoting violence, attack, struggle, the negative, unmanagable, uncontrollable, nonnegotionable force of anarchy, but clearly some don't give a shit about that.

Some people have chosen to call genuine anarchists(who are engaged in struggle far more beautiful than whatever fucking bearaucratic theatrics you engage in) "trolls" "outside agitators" and other diminishing infantilizing bullshit while prioritizing their "communal" gentrification HOAs among other garbage.

so you just dismissed the whole rest of the movement except your immediate friends and/or the ideologically "pure" from your perspective ...

what do you think happens next, after you finish totally isolating yourselves?

(assuming you're not completely full of shit)

You're missing a few buzzwords in your litany.

I think folks who were actually in the woods when some folks went on tour had no idea those liberal asshats were going on tour

Don't worry everyone, there is a preordained detailed plan we made in the meeting before the meeting of the first spokes council that's supposed to actually make the collective decisions of how to block Cop City, but if the spokes council wills something else, we will utilize one of our contingency plans to remind the outside anarchists that they don't insert the terrain we never actually go to like we do, and that the current political crisis requires a reversion to good old fashioned NVDA, ya know, the kind that won the Standing Rock struggle, Line 3, or Keystone XL...? Oh wait we forgot, none of those struggles were actually successful in stopping those projects, but we justify it with the thousands of arrests that went down, and goddamit we want a reenactment, because we deserve it! The idea of liberation is too hard, let's do what some of the townies from the ZAD did and come up with a cooperative agreement with the city of Atlanta to keep some land, at the small price of throwing some militants under the bus... It's just worth it in the long run, and let's face it, if we want to be legible, we gotta COMPOSE ourselves in a way the 501.(c) 3's can relate to.... Our goal should not be to "win" per se, but elongate the struggle as long as possible so we can keep fundraising, and storke our egos and remain socially relevant. Guerilla warfare never go us anything but a couple years of free state in the forest comprised ofnoutside agitators.... Thank goodness most of these outside agitators are finally gone so we could all find each other for one hoorah & play-outvour NVDA wet dream and then go back to our normies lives safely.... It's just more accessible that way, and this way, even the PSL can come too!

coming up with agreements is being authoritarian
making groups decisions is authoritarian
helping inexperienced people learn how to do either of those things is authoritarian

My advice is this: crew up, plan a mission, then hold back pending the results of the planned NVCD. Nobody personally doing the lockdowns themselves is doing anything harmful to the cause of stopping Cop City, the site might shut itself down for the day over their presence, and a political mess in Atlanta afterwards (over the blocked petition drive) is a real possiblity. The negative of this is the likelihood of severe charges instead of the post and forfeits people have come to expect from CD, plus the risk of violent police attacks extending targetting all the way down to journalists and legal observers.

Thus, the value of having reserves not present at any potential on-site roundup and capable of punishing the Atlanta government with direct action, and no pre-emptable by any means. If the action goes peacefully and without heavy charges, these groups stay home. Major police violence, indiscriminate arrests, holds, or extreme charges bring the fury of the reserves thundering down on the city government and on Cop City's backers

i did figure out what NVDA means because i recently read half of "how non-violence protects the state", but i'm confused about the use of AA at the end, is it just the christian rehab group? There just don't appear to be any context clues, as there are no context clues for NVDA either.

oh well, i guess another TOTW about initiation is in order, i'm not seeing a whole lot of indication that there is a plan. Maybe wearing masks is the solution.

no, it's the other one

anarchist ass meeting, they press their butts together

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