this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Critical support. Tbh I think this is a good strategy in general, there's only so much that public, legal, and peaceful tactics can do without a separate entity doing more dangerous but costly direct action. As far as specifics goes, what qualifies as adventurism and when it may be making things worse, idk. But clearly doing this as a separate entity from the student movements, while still voicing support for them, is correct. I believe it was George Jackson that advised a similar two-prong strategy.
Direct escalation usually isn't a good nor possible strategy by peaceful protestors, but peaceful protest isn't nearly enough and the modern prison system is far too massive to hope to gum up with nonviolent bodies.
The anti-communist bit is ignorant, but I think self-described communists are better off vocally supporting any action like this. Not sure if it's a sort of pick-me leftism or just typical sectarianism. But in any case, prove them wrong! Burn 30 cop cars in the name of communism!
There's no such thing as peaceful protesters when every protest is indiscriminately labelled as violent (and antisemitic!) because there's a chall drawing on the ground.
And there can be no such thing as our escalation when every protest is met with incredible police violence and often federal charges.
The state will escalate whenever it wants to and it feels threatened not because some cop cars are burned but because it sees a people's movement as being in direct opposition to the material interests of the class it serves, is of, and is funed by. It doesn't really need a seemingly valid excuse, it can invent one from thin air. Throughout the US, over the last local election cycle, there were candidates (who were then elected) on raising police budgets because the police had been defundee. The only problem is, they weren't defunded. The state wanted more money for cops at the behest of the chamber of commerce so it latched onto something and made some shit up and it worked.
The risk of adventurism is not that the state will have an excuse to escalate, it's that the wider public may be alienated by it rather than have a chance to recognize the role played by capital and the state. If a small group decides to blow up commuter rail train tracks to disrupt white collar workers' participation in the military industrial complex, it's unlikely to be understood that way by the general public unless they've already been long innoculated against that.
I guess there's another risk: your comrades getting arrested and/or killed. That's actually important as well as there are not very many of us. We always need to do a reality check on what we hope to accomplish vs. what we risk. The system to which we are opposed does such monstrous things that many of us begin to feel a sense of selfless opposition, but it is important to recognize that five years of good organizing is much more valuable than punching a single cop.
Anyways I'm ranting and not really arguing against you. Just wanted to add context for how to think about adventurism.
No I appreciate the discussion!
Maybe nitpicking but these are largely the same thing in my view. We're talking about the legitimacy of the state, about the social fabric that influences behavior and flows of energy despite being entirely immaterial in and of itself.
In a vacuum, the state would have no qualms with executing every single one of the student protestors on the spot. The thing stopping them is the fact that a faith in the state and its legitimacy still effectively maintains capital's dominance. People still trust that laws are just and institutions will handle things in the end. A disproportionate escalation on their part undermines that social understanding.
That's why as long as we're working within the system, i.e. understanding and following laws, attempting to use laws and institutions to enact change, we have to allow the state to be the one to violate its own legitimacy. The dual purpose of this part of a movement is to legally interfere with systems, thus drawing attention to them, while demonstrating the illegitimacy and hypocrisy of the state through its disproportionate retaliation.
A separate prong of the movement that's willing and capable of taking non-legal action serves as both the radical focal point for people who see and experience the repression, as well as the revolutionary cudgel by which reforms become palatable to the state and ruling classes. If organized well enough, the two prongs can (secretly) work in tandem, potentially even offering an alternate legitimacy that's capable of seizing and replacing the bourgeois state if the opportunity arises.
But there has to be an organized entity capable of doing so, otherwise revolution isn't yet possible. So the primary focus imo should always be to build this organization, and every potential action should be judged by whether it serves that purpose or not.
Secondary to that are actions that may not grow power but still achieve positive outcomes, such as industrial sabotage. In that case it just has to be a careful analysis of whether the immediate material impact outweighs the potential harm to public opinion and legitimizing of state violence. And as the state undermines its own legitimacy, non-legal action begins to be viewed less negatively by the general public.
I think we agree! Maybe one way to rephrase my angle is that I see many people getting overly concerned with what they imagine the state will use as an excuse and I think they're usually overestimating the impact of the action itself (usually!). I think that inoculation of the public against the state action or in favor of the radical political project is more important. Or as you mention, spreading a consciousness against the legitimacy of state action (and perhaps the state itself), including by inviting certain kinds of overreaction.
For example, I don't think there are many people out there that are more receptive to cops because anarchists burned a bunch of their cars. In my opinion it's unlikely to prevent radicalization and it's unlikely to create a reaction that is legitimized by the burning of the cars. I think it's actually more likely to help radicalize younger people for whom the image itself is inspiring and transfixing. It could draw the focus of budding fascists but I am skeptical that it would, itself, be pushing them into fascism.
What might push people away from radicalization is the pointless infighting from the supposedly anarchist post itself, but that's its own whole thing.