‘Good Cop Radicals:’ How the University & Nonprofits Make Counterinsurgents Out of Middle Class Leftists

From ritornanti - for an insurgent solidarity.
 

‘Good Cop Radicals:’ How the University & Nonprofits Make Counterinsurgents Out of Middle Class Leftists

The ruling class, and the police and military strategists that serve them, prefer the type of social movements orbiting nonprofit funding and academic career tracks to those rooted in the fighting capacity and care networks of the working and ‘surplus’ classes. Why is it that this ‘movement middle class’ of social workers, lawyers, nonprofit coordinators, teachers and professors, have have learned to disregard and fear working class autonomy and revolt, and, rather than fuel it, manage it?

 

 

‘Good Cop Radicals’ argues that this is a predictable outcome of ‘counterinsurgency’ – the police and military ‘science’ of movement repression – in which counterrevolutionaries seek to create a ‘pacified’ block, more invested in the continued existence of racial capitalism, who moderate movements in return for minor concessions. The zine calls for the mass defection of ‘respectable protestors’ from ‘movement middle management,’ in favour of an insurgent solidarity with the ‘criminal elements,’ and for the redistribution of money, accountability and risk with the excluded classes.

 

  • Riso printed limited edition available to purchase from AK Press UK: akuk.com (forthcoming).
    Proceeds supporting Sudanese Anarchist Comrades’ mutual aid fund.

 

  • Inkjet printed standard edition available to purchase for cost of printing/posting from Seditionist Press: seditionist.uk (forthcoming).
     
 

 

Comments

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/26/2026 - 16:51

I feel like I keep seeing younger anarchists working to rehabilitate imagery, slogans, and ideas from tiny bygone maoist cells. What's up with that? Like, I get that there's a fetishistic element: "oooh, wooow, these groups robbed banks and set off the occasional bomb! how exciting!" But is that it? For example, do the people who put this writing out know how shit the May 19th Organization and its predecessor in Weather actually were politically?

Totally bizarre for anarchists to be doing this IMO.

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/26/2026 - 21:38

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

would you mind explaining what about this is maoist? the cultivated urgency and apparent lack of choices?
the part about the professional/managerial leftist kids forming the ngo-governmental complex seems true. i don't like all the identity based teleological lurches, but it seems to me the writer has one of those brains that progresses along a logical chain to it's total conclusion

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/27/2026 - 10:00

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

Their use of imagery from M19 and Prairie Fire, their fawning quotations of David Gilbert, the recapitulation of privilege politics --- which itself emerged as a driving ideological force among the same exact sort of college educated middle class kids who made up SDS and its armed offshoots.

It's pretty obvious if you know what to look for.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/27/2026 - 12:41

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

i see
so sds was a politicking, vanguard style mass org, classic MLM style, in contrast to other contemporaries such as yippies, situ groups, or edward abbey etc

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/27/2026 - 08:10

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

It can be summed up by the amount of university students that have been flooding into the anarchist space looking for a "political home" rather than them having an interest in outright anarchism. The zine authors announce themselves as middle class but don't claim their obvious university educations despite the specific (very non-anarchist) sources they choose to cite (who the fuck reads Joy James outside of the academy?).

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 01/29/2026 - 10:31

A university education is not categorically a bad thing, it all depends on whether one sees thru its general tendency to steering the "educated" into deadening-ends! (i.e. authoritarian) Or whether they can keep their minds open to the reality that such institutional education tends to misdirect them, i.e. going over a few voices in anarchist thought, but avoiding other, more liberatory voices. (Which, ostensibly, they're SUPPOSED to explore for themselves, but I think, usually means they must stumble on writings such as Raoul Vaneigem, after possibly learning only about Kropotkin and the like!)

If such graduates now come at everyone arrogantly, then there is a problem. But if they are still open to the truth that THERE IS MUCH MORE to know, then that is acceptable, and the mark of a more truly conscious person.

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/02/2026 - 10:43

"formatted for zine printing" uh no man you need to redo this if you want people to print it

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