(en) Canada, linchpin.ca: Mortar #1 - The Nature of Militancy

It is a truism common among Western anarchists, and the revolutionary left more generally, 
that militancy is in short supply these days. This sentiment is often expressed in a 
rather offhanded way, as a lazy excuse to rationalize decades of working-class defeats, or 
else through fiery polemics denouncing the cautious reformism exhibited by trade unions, 
?progressives?, liberals and social democrats. Far too infrequently is an honest attempt 
made to clarify precisely what we mean by the term militancy?or better yet, how we can 
help qualitatively develop this characteristic within movements struggling for social and 
economic justice. Instead, militancy is often presented uncritically, as though it were
some sort of esoteric derivative of political ideology, a synonym for violent tactics, or 
even as a tactic unto itself?a vital and yet somehow unattainable sine qua non of radical 
change.

In this article we will attempt to clear up some of this confusion by providing a working 
definition of the term militancy, and an answer to the related question of what it means 
to be a militant. We will then move on to explore the contentious 'diversity of tactics' 
debate that emerged within the anti-globalization movement, and continues to this day?a
disagreement rooted in the heterogeneous political composition of the movement's 
participants, and two opposing, yet ultimately liberal conceptions of violence. Finally, 
we will offer a brief study of past movements that have exhibited a high level of 
militancy and political cohesion, with an eye to distilling common characteristics that
could potentially aid in the development of a contemporary North American movement able to 
effectively wage war on the forces of neoliberal capitalism currently embodied under the 
rubric of austerity.

I: Mapping the Terrain: Towards a Common Conception of Militancy

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
- Frederick Douglass

Outside of academic journals, there have been few articles published in English that 
attempt to define the term militancy. One noteworthy exception is What Do We Mean by 
?Militancy?? by Steve D'Arcy, published in 2011 by ZNet. The article sets out to reconcile 
the type of nonviolent militancy favoured by Martin Luther King Junior to the property 
destruction and street-fighting most frequently associated with black blocs. Using these 
two seemingly disparate examples to frame its analysis, the article offers four criteria 
for defining militant actions. According to D'Arcy, for an action to be considered 
militant it must be:

a) Grievance-motivated, that is, motivated by a desire to protest against something/fight 
for social change.

b) Adversarial, that is, an action that identifies clear enemies; targets are not treated 
as potential allies to be won over or convinced, but rather, as adversaries that must be 
pressured and defeated by means of struggle.

c) Confrontational, that is, it must seek to initiate, intensify or escalate conflict, 
rather than seeking accommodation and compromise.

d) Collective, that is, part of struggle that is collectively carried out. Even in the 
case of individual actions, they are done within the context of a wider social movement.

To this list, we would add a fifth qualifier:

e) Unmediated, that is, an action that is carried out directly, without the mediation or 
representation of a third-party. This addition is required in order to preclude possible 
actions such as appealing to politicians or union officials, and engaging in campaigns 
over social media sites such as facebook.

These criteria should be flexible enough to offer an exhaustive, value-neutral definition 
of the term militancy. D'Arcy goes on to list four 'modes' (or forms) that these types of 
militant action can take:

1) Symbolic Defiance ? entails communicating defiance by means of ?symbolic? or 
?theatrical? acts, to convey publicly one?s rejection or refusal to recognize the 
legitimacy of some person, practice, policy or institution that is upheld as authoritative 
by the powers that be. For example: the public burning of draft cards, or staging a march 
in open defiance of a court order prohibiting it, etc.

2) Physical Confrontation - entails some sort of physical conflict with adversaries. For 
example: street fighting with police, confronting neo-nazis, forcing one's way through a 
police line or into a public building, defending a squat from eviction, etc.

3) Property Destruction - entails the destruction or damaging of property. For example:
breaking a window, sabotaging a piece of machinery, vandalizing a statue, etc.

4) Institutional Disruption - entails the disruption of the functioning of an institution. 
For example: occupying an office of a government official to prevent them from being able 
to carry out their job, workers withdrawing their labour to shut down a business, 
sitting-in to disrupt a retail store, etc.

Of these four 'modes' of militancy, symbolic defiance seems out of place, by virtue of its 
fundamentally passive nature; its more militant manifestations would assumedly be covered 
by one of the three other categorical forms. We will explore the issue of symbolic 
militancy further in our discussion of the role of violence. For our purposes here, it is 
worth noting that D'Arcy is addressing members of the global social justice movement, in 
hopes of encouraging a mutually respectful conversation on tactics. Borrowing from King, 
he ends the article by providing two considerations with which to judge the merits of a
particular tactic: strategic and moral. Through this evaluative framework, D'Arcy reveals 
his own preference for King's favoured strategy of nonviolent struggle, which drew its 
strength from widespread notions of Christian morality and the contradictions between the 
promises of liberal democracy and the reality of Jim Crow style segregation. Morality, 
however, is a fundamentally subjective concept, and is therefore not particularly useful 
in objective considerations of whether or not a tactic will be successful in achieving its 
strategic aims.

Who Are the Militants?

We refuse a politics which infantilizes us and people who look like us, and which 
continually paints nonwhite and/or non-male demographics as helpless, vulnerable, and 
incapable of fighting for our own liberation.
- Croatoan, Who is Oakland?

The answer to the question posed by this section should be fairly self-evident: militants 
are individuals who habitually engage in militant tactics. We felt it important, however, 
to briefly elaborate on this point in order to address a current of thought that in recent 
years has become increasingly prevalent within the activist milieu?particularly among 
activists steeped in the dominant stream of anti-oppression politics?and to make a point 
about where militancy comes from. In doing so, we are not attempting to minimize or gloss 
over the vital contributions made by anti-oppression activists and theoreticians over the 
past several decades. Rather, we are taking aim at a particular tendency that has emerged 
out of contemporary anti-oppression discourse: privilege theory, also pejoratively 
referred to by its detractors as identity politics.

A common argument advanced by many proponents of privilege theory is that the ability to 
safely employ militant tactics is intimately linked to an individual's relationship to 
systems of oppression and privilege, and accordingly, that it is the most privileged 
members of society (ie white, cis-gendered males) who are most likely to carry out 
militant struggles. When this type of militant action is carried out (by white, 
cis-gendered males or otherwise), it is often denounced by self-appointed representatives 
of oppressed identity groups and/or their ?allies? for allegedly putting marginalized 
groups at risk. This often results in those seen as responsible for these transgressions 
being asked to ?check their privilege.? The exceptional essay Who is Oakland: 
Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation, which describes 
the authors' first-hand experiences dealing with proponents of privilege theory at Occupy 
Oakland, does an excellent job of discrediting this line of argument.

?For too long there has been no alternative to this politics of privilege and cultural 
recognition, and so rejecting this liberal political framework has become synonymous with 
a refusal to seriously address racism, sexism, and homophobia in general. Even and 
especially when people of colour, women, and queers imagine and execute alternatives to
this liberal politics of cultural inclusion, they are persistently attacked as white, 
male, and privileged by the cohort that maintains and perpetuates the dominant praxis.

[...]

Contemporary anti-oppression politics constantly reproduces stereotypes about the 
passivity and powerlessness of these populations, when in fact it is precisely people from 
these groups?poor women of colour defending their right to land and housing, trans* street 
workers fighting back against murder and violence, black, brown, and Asian American 
militant struggles against white supremacist attacks?who have waged the most powerful and 
successfully militant uprisings in American history.?

As the authors point out, the greatest demonstrations of militancy have historically come 
from the ranks of the most exploited and oppressed segments of society: those who quite
literally have the least to lose, and the most to gain by risking their personal safety. 
Revolutions are not safe affairs, and the militant actions taken as part of a genuinely
revolutionary strategy are not congruent with a politics of safety. As the authors of Who 
is Oakland? eloquently put it,?[t]he choice is not between danger and safety, but between 
the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence, deprivation, and 
death.?

II. The Anti-globalization Movement & ?Diversity of Tactics?

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

In the closing weeks of the 20th century, a new movement burst onto the world stage. ?The 
Battle of Seattle?, as it became widely known, was preceded by other opening salvos of the 
?Fourth World War??the 1994 Zapatista uprising, timed to coincide with the introduction of 
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the 1989 Caracazo riots in Venezuela 
offering two salient examples. Nevertheless, the shutting down of a World Trade 
Organization (WTO) summit in the middle of one of America's preeminent cities is widely
understood as the official birth of the anti-globalization movement. From its inception, 
however, this fledgling movement was hamstrung by a bitter disagreements over 
tactics?disagreements that often spilled out into physical confrontations, such as those 
frequently witnessed between so-called pacifists and black bloc participants engaged in
corporate property destruction.

This now-familiar dynamic played out repeatedly throughout the early mass demonstrations 
of the anti-globalization era: a militant element would emerge from the safety of large, 
?peaceful? demonstrations and smash some windows, often leading to conflict with more 
reformist elements of the demonstration and/or the police, mass arrests, and a litany of 
mutual denunciations within the independent and corporate media. This problem eventually 
led, following the 2000 demonstrations against the G8 counter-summit in Montreal, to the 
establishment of a system of separate colour-coded protest zones (broken down into green, 
yellow and red, based on risk) before the movement was temporarily put on ice by the 
attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the intense atmosphere of insecurity and repression
that followed.

By the time the 2003 protests against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) 
occurred in Miami, the police and security forces had adapted their tactics. The Miami 
Model effectively seized upon the preexisting divisions within the anti-globalization 
movement; aided by a massive corporate media blitz and the increased domestic security 
expenditures of the War on Terror, the state employed the spectre of violent anarchists as 
justification for a well-orchestrated counter-insurgency operation that included the use 
of preemptive and mass arrests and the enactment of de facto martial law in areas of the 
city considered strategically important to the functioning of the convention. Based on the 
?success? of Miami, this model of policing became the standard protocol for dealing with 
subsequent anti-globalization convergences.

In an effort to preempt internal divisions over tactical disagreements and to build on the 
colour-coded model of spatial separation, the coalition organizing protests against the
2008 Republican National Convention (RNC) in St Paul, Minneapolis drafted a document which 
attempted to set guidelines for a code of conduct among participants. The document, dubbed 
the St Paul Principles was composed of four points of unity:

1. Our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of 
other groups.

2. The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.

3. Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or
media denunciations of fellow activists and events.

4. We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, 
disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists 
and others.

The perceived grand compromise of the St Paul Principles served as a direct inspiration
for the subsequent Pittsburgh Principles?used during the 2009 demonstrations against the 
G20 in Pittsburgh?and the Statement of Solidarity and Respect passed by the Toronto 
Community Mobilization Network (TCMN), which coordinated demonstrations against the 2010 
G8/G20 Summit in Toronto. Yet despite their laudable intent, these statements of 
principles have failed to accomplish what they set out to do; the divisions that they were 
intended to resolve still persist?if anything, the two sides of the dispute have merely
hardened their positions. The political fallout from the Toronto G8/G20 demonstrations,
where a black bloc broke away from the main labour/NGO march and rioted in the city's 
downtown core, factored heavily into divisions at the Occupy Toronto encampment the 
following year; a similar antipathy towards anarchists and militant tactics was seen in
Occupy movements across North America. This antagonism reached its climax following the
publication of an article entitled The Cancer in Occupy by journalist Chris Hedges, which 
described ?Black Bloc anarchists?[sic] as a ?cancer? within the Occupy movement; a 
subsequent debate between Hedges and a representative of anarchist group Crimethinc on the 
topic of Diversity of Tactics was watched by thousands of viewers over livestream?with 
both sides claiming victory.

On the Logic of ?One No, Many Yeses?

Good revolutionary theory, strategy, and practice, or good revolutionary politics and 
practice is a totality which is always incomplete but constantly going forward, each 
aspect providing the criteria for the worth and growth of the others.
- Michael Albert, What is to be Undone?

In hindsight, the Diversity of Tactics debate was, at its core, the inevitable product of 
a movement defined by its heterogeneous political makeup. The anti-globalization movement 
prided itself on being a movement composed of ?one no and many yeses?; this pluralism 
helped attract hundreds of thousands of activists from across the world, united by a 
shared rejection of neoliberal capitalism (also referred to as corporate globalization), 
yet it lacked the cohesion necessary to overcome these activists' underlying political 
differences. As the movement's initial strategy of shutting down the meetings of the 
global elite became less and less feasible, these political fault-lines came into clearer 
focus.

In his 1974 book What is to be Undone?, Michael Albert provides a useful framework for 
understanding why the anti-globalization movement was unable to come to a compromise on
the question of tactics. Drawing lessons from a critical analysis of Marxist-Leninism, 
Anarchism, Maoism and the New Left, Albert outlines three interrelated elements that, 
taken together, form the basis of any political movement.

1) Theory ? an analysis of existing society that seeks to understand its contradictions
and provide a competing vision of society that addresses these contradictions. Good theory 
provides a movement with tangible goals and a greater understanding of the dynamics that 
need to be navigated in order to achieve them.

2) Strategy ? the path taken to achieve desired goals. Strategy seeks to advantageously
engage the contradictions in society identified by political theory; the more 
comprehensive the theory, the more potentially precise the strategy; the more incomplete 
the theory, the more vague the strategy and the greater the need for constant enhancement.

3) Practice/Tactics ? the tangible actions taken to implement strategy. Tactics must be
flexible enough to adapt to a given situation, and should be abandoned if they fail to 
yield desired results. The repeated success or failure of particular tactics can lead to 
corresponding changes to strategy and the sharpening of political theory.

As noted above, the anti-globalization movement was a diverse coalition of groups and 
individuals with differing political ideologies and interests, united by a shared 
opposition to the effects of neoliberal capitalism. As long as its participants could 
feasibly pursue a unified strategy of shutting down the trade summits that they had come 
together to oppose, differences in political theory could be safely glossed over, and a
variety of complementary tactics could be successfully deployed in order to achieve a 
tangible goal. Robbed of the capacity to impede the functioning of these summits by 
advancements in state contingency planning, the movement was forced to come up with a new 
strategy. At this point, preexisting differences in political theory surfaced, effectively 
splitting the movement into two camps. The moderates, who formed the vast majority of the 
movement's participants, chose to use these summits as a way to register their dissent 
through the socially accepted channels of liberal democracy, in an effort to reform 
capitalism by mitigating its neoliberal excesses. Inspired by their own liberal 
conceptions of the legacy of US civil rights activists, this group pursued a strategy that 
sought to grow the movement quantitatively, to use these summits to ?get their message 
out? and ?have their voices heard? in the hope of ?speaking truth to power? and attracting 
ever more participants, for ever larger demonstrations. On the other side of the split 
were the radicals, an active minority often characterized by their use, or acceptance, of 
black bloc tactics. Comprised primarily of adherents of political theories that saw 
dialogue with capitalism and liberal democracy as pointless, members of the radical 
contingent sought to intensify conflict with the police and ?break the spell? cast by the 
corporate spectacle through sensational acts of property destruction. This strategy could 
be seen as one of qualitative development, in that its participants sought to advance 
struggle by fostering a more effective capacity to wield violence. These two contradictory 
political tendencies were always present in the anti-globalization movement, and have 
persisted into the subsequent struggle against the present phase of neoliberalism: the age 
of austerity.

Representative Politics and Productive Violence

We will know the decisive moment has come when we can cease to be followers of causes and 
become producers of effects instead.
- AK Thompson, Black Bloc, White Riot

At the crux of the Diversity of Tactics debate lies a dispute between those favouring a
strategy of nonviolence, on one hand, and the practitioners and sympathizers of 
(primarily) spectacular violence on the other. The terms of this debate were frequently
muddied during the course of the anti-globalization movement by the claims of some 
advocates of black bloc tactics that attacks on corporate property did not constitute 
violence. These attempts to draw an ethical distinction between harm caused to human 
beings and the destruction of inanimate objects represent an understandable, yet 
ultimately misguided appeal for liberal legitimacy, and have served as a distraction from 
the much more important debate over the proper role of violence in movements struggling
for social change.

In Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent, author AK 
Thompson tracks the semiotic development of the anti-globalization protestor and the 
post-9/11 conflation of black bloc participants with terrorism. While contextualizing 
these attempts by the state and corporate media to represent black bloc violence in such 
terms as part of a larger strategy of reconciling the liberal democratic notion of the 
right to protest to the regulatory framework of the War on Terror, Thompson nonetheless
identifies an important similarity between these two political subjects. He notes that 
both black bloc participants and terrorists were similar in that they ?sought to affect
the public by launching assaults on constituted power in order to intervene in political 
processes to which they had no direct access.? The black bloc's recourse to purely 
spectacular violence?ie the smashing of a Starbucks window?is thus held up as evidence of 
its participants' inability to escape the ?bourgeois epistemology? of representational 
politics. Spectacular violence is ?an action in excess of the law that serves in the end 
to reaffirm the law itself? through the implicit acknowledgement of its own limited 
effect. ?Without a decisive challenge to bourgeois epistemology, even the seemingly pure 
act?violence as an end in itself?can be recuperated as image. And while the intensified
image heightens the experience of presence for the viewer, this presence is not yet direct 
engagement with the material world. For that, another type of violence is required.?

For Thompson, the direct action tactics of the black bloc offered its participants a 
pedagogical means to pass through violence?a process of qualitative political development 
similar, in principle, to that experienced by the colonial subjects of Frantz Fanon's The 
Wretched of the Earth. But in order to complete this process of development, North 
American black bloc participants need to break through the glass ceiling of representative 
politics promoted by liberal democracy and begin to move from the relative safety of 
spectacular violence to the more dangerous, yet potentially rewarding world of productive 
violence. Largely synonymous with Walter Benjamin's concept of law-making violence, 
productive violence is violence used to achieve material gains??a contest between 
competing sovereign agencies?, rather than an act of symbolic defiance. A clear example
can be found in the difference between smashing a window at a demonstration and defending 
an occupied building or a barricade from the police. If we are to develop a militant 
movement capable of wielding violence in pursuit of a revolutionary strategy, this step
cannot be avoided.

III. Militancy and Mass Movements:Collective Identities and Affective Bonds

And the moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to 
seize its victory.
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

As the authors of Who is Oakland? noted, militancy tends to emerge from the most oppressed 
and exploited segments of society?from those who are motivated by intense grievances and 
simultaneously denied justice through their exclusion from ?legitimate? channels of 
redress. Yet these conditions alone do not automatically produce the phenomenon of mass
militancy. Nor can a high degree of political theory, contained in a small group or 
political party isolated from the population in which they operate, accomplish this feat. 
Indeed, mass militancy requires a high level of political consciousness widely dispersed 
among a population that identifies itself as under attack, or otherwise threatened by the 
dominant order. A requisite factor in the formation of revolutionary militancy lies in the 
affective bonds formed between participants who see themselves as part of a collective 
identity. From this springs the development of political theory that accurately assesses 
the material basis of their subjugation, leading to a strategy and corresponding series of 
tactics that can effectively contend with the institutional structures that reproduce this 
condition.

As anarchists, we cannot ignore the fact that one of the most potent catalysts for mass
militancy is nationalism. The myth of the nation remains one of the most powerful myths in 
human existence, unique in that it contains within it the entirety of a people's history 
and culture; its latent militancy is unleashed through anti-colonial insurgencies and wars 
of national liberation. Born from the violence of colonization, Fanon noted, 
?decolonization is always a violent event.? Maintaining a foreign occupation requires a
constant resort to the most extreme forms of repression, sanctified by a dehumanizing 
racism on the part of the colonial regime; this makes the shift to armed uprising a 
natural development in the struggles of colonized peoples. Through this formative 
political process, Fanon explains, ?[t]he very same people who had it constantly drummed 
into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express 
themselves with force. In fact, the colonist has always shown them the path they should
follow to liberation.? Yet while it provides a strong impetus for mass militancy, 
nationalism also glosses over important internal contradictions in a given society. With 
very few notable exceptions*, anti-imperialist struggles are temporary cross-class 
alliances that end up recuperated by an emergent national bourgeoisie or political class 
whose interests are ultimately entrenched through the establishment of a ?revolutionary? 
national government. Formal colonization thus gives way to a new reality, in which the 
national economy remains subjugated to the whims of transnational capital, while the 
original impetus for struggle becomes masked by the national character of the new state
security apparatus.

Some of the most militant and politically sophisticated mass movements of modern history 
have emerged in response to the shared oppression of groups persecuted on the basis of 
race, ethnicity or religion. As socially constructed identities, these categories 
intersect and overlap in different ways depending on the social context from which they
arise; in secular, white supremacist nations such as the United States and Canada, race
plays a much more central role in social stratification and class composition than either 
religion or ethnicity, whereas in Iraq or Sri Lanka, the opposite is true. These social
divisions can serve a similar role to nationalism, in that they provide a set of similar 
experiences relative to dominant power structures and a collective identity that informs 
and reflects these experiences; the bombing of a Shia shrine in Baghdad can thus be 
interpreted as an attack against all Shia muslims, while the news that cops in Oakland 
have murdered a young black man will resonate with millions of black Americans' own 
experiences of dealing with racist police. These individual acts of injustice can cause
long-simmering resentment to boil over into intense flare-ups of mass militancy. In the
absence of a coherent strategy or collective political program, however, these singular
events are easily isolated and manipulated by the ruling class into provoking a backlash 
from reactionary elements of society?leading to an escalation of intra-class conflict 
and/or the further hardening of racial, religious or ethnic divisions; the United States' 
history, replete with militant black uprisings savagely repressed by the lynch mobs of the 
white working class, is a tragic case in point.

The recent rise of so-called ?vigilante feminist? movements in Egypt and India has served 
as a stark reminder that militancy is not a strictly male affair. Not only have women 
historical played important roles in militant struggles based around nationalism and race, 
the shared experience of patriarchal oppression itself can also be a powerful factor in
the spread of mass militancy. Women united around issues such as pervasive sexual assault, 
economic and political marginalization and reproductive rights have waged struggles both 
independently, and within broader movements?such as the Mujeres Libres' multi-faceted 
campaigns undertaken within the Spanish Civil War, which often drew them into conflicts
with the sexist tendencies of their male comrades in the CNT. Attacking patriarchy, and
the gendered division of the working class, is a vital component of spreading militancy to 
larger segments of the class.

Also frequently drawn into militant conflict with the violence of patriarchal society are 
those who are marginalized through non-conforming gender expression and sexuality. 
Although these oppressions are distinct and often complex, they nonetheless share a 
similar material structural oppression in the heteronormative ideals of patriarchal 
society. In the face of recent advances in gay and lesbian rights, and the moderate 
reformism championed by bourgeois representatives of the movement, it can be easy to 
forget that the Pride parade?before its successful liberal assimilation and capitalist 
recuperation?had its roots in the Stonewall riots of New York. This militant legacy has
been carried on by anti-assimilationist queer groups such as the Bash Back! network, and 
the racialized queer collective Check It, based out of Washington, DC. Organizations such 
as Transgender Nation and The Transexual Menace have employed militant direct action 
tactics to highlight their exclusion from the LGB community, leading to a growing 
acceptance of transgendered oppression as framing part of the demands of the broader LGBTQ 
movement.

Disabled people and their supporters have also demonstrated a high propensity for 
militancy in their struggles around accessibility, with examples including the 
long-standing US direct-action based group ADAPT, or the coalition of disability activists 
that clashed with Bolivian riot police in 2012. Radical disability movements, often 
comprised of people with a diversity of physical and mental impairments, struggle against 
disableism?the structural and ideological process through which disabled people are denied 
individual agency and collective participation in society.

The point of highlighting these seemingly disparate examples is not simply to offer a 
litany of identity categories, but to drive home the point that militancy is a collective 
phenomenon, fostered by shared opposition to dominant structures of oppression and 
exploitation. Solidarity grows through the affective bonds formed through identifying 
another person's struggle as your own. The collective identities outlined in this section 
are by no means intended to be exhaustive; other relevant examples could include the role 
that collective identity has played in recent student struggles in Qu?bec and Chile, in
fostering the militancy of the Luddites and early syndicalist movements, or the role that 
a shared anarchist identity played in kicking off the 2008 insurrection in Greece.

Beyond Violence vs. Nonviolence

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose.
- Comrades from Cairo, Letter to the Occupy Movement

Capitalism is perpetually engaged in its own reinvention, constantly adapting to 
incorporate new technological developments, overcoming obstacles to investment and 
recuperating potential adversaries through political representation; as these 
transformations occur, they produce accompanying shifts in class composition. Anarchists 
should be attentive to these changes and willing to modify our tactics and strategic 
orientation as need be. Our political theory must aim to identify the segments of the 
working class with the greatest potential for militancy; not to assume the role of their 
political representatives?as liberal activists and Marxist-Leninists would seek to do?but 
so that we can actively demonstrate our solidarity, either by joining with them as fellow 
militants, or by otherwise helping to prepare the conditions for their struggles to bear 
fruit. In some cases this support may require the resort to violence, though in many other 
instances it will not. The important point is not to fetishize violence or nonviolence,
but to approach particular tactics with an eye towards their overall strategic effectiveness.

Our task as anarchists is to actively participate in the formulation of a revolutionary
collective identity, imbued with a militant class consciousness and the capacity to engage 
in productive violence against the institutions that reproduce capitalism, white 
supremacy, patriarchy and disableism. The working class is not, as reductionists would 
have us believe, a homogenous block with identical material interests. Nor will the 
overthrow of capitalism magically fix the hierarchical social divisions fostered by 
systemic oppression. It is therefore necessary to attack the structural pillars of 
oppression, while simultaneously combating the influence that these systems exert on 
segments of the class that materially benefit from their perpetuation under capitalism.
Anarchists must do this, not only because it's the politically principled, or moral thing 
to do, but because it's a necessary step towards building a revolutionary working class
movement. This strategy requires the development of self-organized campaigns on the 
intermediary level; autonomous struggles that can join together, whenever practical, to
create larger, more effective networks of resistance. For a movement to retain its 
militant character as it grows, these networks must built, not by glossing over of 
political and tactical differences, but by recognizing the pursuit of common strategic 
goals. Advances made through struggles waged by one segment of the class can expose the
contradictions inherent to capitalism for all to see; the resulting epiphany can often be 
catalytic in the spread of generalized class consciousness?particularly in the case of 
tactics.

We must also work hard to build towards a movement that defines itself not simply through 
its militant opposition to existing power dynamics, but through its creation and 
uncompromisingly militant defence of liberatory institutions of counter-power. Whether 
these be physical institutions, such as occupied apartment blocks converted into free 
housing and social centres, or political institutions such as neighbourhood or workplace 
assemblies, these gains must be defended and expanded upon if we are to sustain a 
revolutionary movement beyond its initial gains. Building counter-power, and framing our 
struggles with this in mind, is the only way to remove ourselves from the never-ending 
circuit of representational politics and to begin to assert ourselves as free human 
beings, fighting for a future of our choosing.