By K and Sasha
“Cop City will never be built!” All of us chanted this at some point. This rallying cry filled our heads with possibilities and invited others to meet our optimism. The movement started off small, at times clumsy and awkward, but with contagious ferocity fueled by that optimism, it took off. Mass actions, banner drops, direct actions, sabotage, phone banking, flooding city hall, social media campaigns that relentlessly ratio-ed the mayor, parties, occupation, land defense, festivals. The months and years of struggle expanded political imagination as it offered glimpses of hope and swells of action. Even in moments of disproportionate state violence, possibilities expanded, and the movement kept growing.
As the movement’s popularity grew, it sometimes seemed like the city might lose the consent they needed to uphold hegemony. At other times, it seemed that the increasing financial costs of the project would dissuade contractors and investors. And for some in the movement, it seemed like a historic referendum campaign would force the city to concede on a technicality.
We were wrong. But, contrary to what some might argue, we did not fail to stop Cop City because the movement was poorly organized or unpopular. In fact, the movement was one of the most popular activist movements in recent decades, gaining national and international media attention and attracting thousands of people to participate. Nor did it fail because of participants’ shortcomings: cowardice, pessimism, a lack of will. In fact, over and over, participants engaged in acts of bravery and will: Sabotage, yes, but also locking down to machinery, marching unpermitted through the streets, attending a festival despite recent domestic terrorism charges for nothing other than being in the forest, joining lawsuits against the county, confronting the mayor anywhere he went, risking jobs for publicly supporting the movement. Encampment, yes, but also providing daily emotional support for other militants, having long conversations with other participants over the ethical implications of property destruction, engaging in slow trust-building work to maintain coalitions over long periods of time, jail support, care clinics, media. And the movement exhibited persistent resilience with people staying committed over years, rearranging their lives to accommodate the movement, and continuing to fight in the face of extreme repression.
The movement failed to stop Cop City due to a combination of objective limitations from without and subjective limitations from within. But if we understand the movement as one battle within a longer war, then the movement as a whole shouldn’t be seen as a failure either. In this movement, we tested boundaries of resistance, developed organizational infrastructure, built solidarity, clarified the state’s capacities and position, and gathered information to develop our analysis for a revolutionary strategy. Through the struggle, we developed our revolutionary consciousness, a necessary precondition for more durable wins in the future.
The struggle and its end are now a part of our collective historical process. On one hand, the state’s escalating militarization and intensifying repression deepen the asymmetry of force in struggle, increasing the pressure of the next battle. On the other hand, the state deploys familiar tactics like clockwork: it attempts to sow divisions, violently represses partisans, and absorbs the tactics and strategies of resistance movements. Such predictable strategies give us the opportunity to practice, reflect, and course-correct.
In this article, we draw out lessons from the movement to increase the resilience and strength of the revolutionary movement. First, we argue that abolition alone is not a theory of revolutionary change. Then, we unpack three theories of change that co-existed in the movement. In the section, “We Make the Revolution and the Revolution Makes Us” we explore the subjective limitations in the movement by weighing strategies and tactics against two questions. Then, we engage conjunctural analysis to unpack what the movement reveals about contemporary objective conditions of revolutionary struggle. Here, we make some polemical arguments about future movements in order to spur debate. In the final section, we offer a friendly reminder to comrades for future rounds of struggle.
Abolition is not Revolution
The movement to defend Weelaunee and stop Cop City was, broadly speaking, an abolitionist movement. As the concept and framework of abolition has popularized in the last decade, especially through the movement for Black lives and the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion, it has taken on various meanings, spawned disparate strategies, and produced at least 35 new books. While we celebrate that abolition has a presence in popular leftist discourse, we worry that a lack of clarity on the role of policing, upheld by a lack of clarity about the state’s function within settler colonialism and capitalism, has caused misunderstandings about the order of events.
Abolition cannot and will not precede revolution, and abolition is not, in itself, a theory of revolution.
On the one hand, discipline and punishment are social relations. For instance, as Foucault argued, under capitalism we participate in our own oppression by internalizing “normal” behaviors and avoiding deviant ones in order to avoid punishment. We police each other through small actions, like social snubbing, and large actions, like calling the cops to have somebody arrested. This normalized everyday disciplinary power we enact is an extension of the discipline carried out by the state– through surveillance cameras, prisons, and policing. After all, state domination (and ruling class domination) is the goal.
On the other hand, we are not kept in line through internalized disciplinary power alone. Crucially, the state exercises control through economic compulsion and backs it up with a standing army that has, in the US, the most advanced weapons in the world. If we understand the state as a social relation that takes material form through institutions of power, then we can see that police are the army of the enemy; prisons are their detention camps for prisoners of war; cameras are enemy surveillance; guns, tasers, laws, squad cars, and batons are weapons of war. In a state of war, no army will lay down its weapons or destroy its detention camps and no state, if it wishes to preserve itself, will dismantle its army.
If we think of abolition as defeating the enemy’s army, then we can understand abolition as a part of a larger revolutionary process. It’s not the only part, of course: winning means transforming the social relations of capitalism, settler colonialism, and the state, the end of exploitation through a radical reorientation towards each other, labor, the products of our labor, and nonhuman nature. Importantly, the transformation of social relations and abolition of value requires a large and broad swath of society.
While some abolitionists assert that abolition is the movement to abolish the conditions that give rise to incarceration and policing, we prefer to call that movement communism in order to draw attention to the abolition of the production of value itself (as opposed to the abolition of racist oppression, the state, or unequal distribution alone).
Different Theories of Change Coexisted in the Movement
With this understanding of abolition as part of the revolutionary movement but not its whole, we can turn towards identifying different theories of revolution that existed within the movement against Cop City. Within these theories, advocates make explicit or implicit claims about who is, should be, or will be the active agents of change.
The first theory is a theory of no revolution. Pragmatic approaches that focused on trying to save the forest with technical, legal, bureaucratic, or backdoor tactics were disinterested in forming a movement. Within a reformist activist framework, the disorganized masses or broader left were viewed either as a threat to “successful” activism or potential sources of activist labor to add to an already existing legal/bureaucratic approach. Thankfully, as the movement developed, some who had earlier taken this approach transformed through the process of struggle and came to embrace and defend the movement.
The second and third theories often existed in some combination. From the beginning, a tone was set that the movement to save the forest could simultaneously continue to fan the flames from the George Floyd Rebellion and potentially present an effective strategy (and inspiration) for abolitionist or autonomist fights during the crumbling of capitalist hegemony. The call for a decentralized autonomous movement embraced the creativity shown through the movement for Black lives, pipeline protests, and the 2020 rebellion. Under the banner of “diversity of tactics,” it suggested that multiple groups with disparate goals could unite around 1 clear goal and choose their own paths. This would not only spur experimentation and help avoid typical left infighting but could also spare the movement from being easily defeated by state repression. Likely, it would take some un-predetermined combination of strategies and tactics to win.
Autonomists of the second theory focused more on organizing other already-existing autonomists or leftists, reflecting a belief (even if implicit) that people attracted to the culture of the anarchist/environmentalist/antifascist punk scene (broadly defined) are/should be/will be the main or among the main key players in a revolutionary scenario. While few autonomists might agree with this statement, tending to preface the role of the lumpen proletariat or surplus populations perhaps, some tactics and strategies within the movement oriented primarily towards this subculture. To be clear, the movement would have ended far earlier if it weren’t for the constant renewal of energy, skills, and commitments from anarchists.
Others focused on capturing broader layers of people beyond the left and pulling them into the experience of struggle, reflecting a belief that the current composition of resistance movements is insufficient to come out on top of a revolutionary scenario (the third theory). Not all efforts towards this end were successful—neighborhood canvassing, after all the calls to focus on the surrounding neighborhoods, culminated only in a couple temporary local “spokespeople” for the movement, falling short of its ambitions. But when these efforts were successful, such as in the case of the Weelaunee Coalition organizing events (marches, rallies, festivals, teach-ins, etc.), they expanded the reach, capacity, and vision of the movement.
The movement overall achieved both—it served as a rallying cry and inspiring focus for the left, while capturing some of the anger and determination in post-2020 Atlanta. And we think engagement from both already-existing leftists and people without a rigorous theory of liberation was necessary and important. Instead of wholesale condemning theory two or three, we want to think across these theories to weigh the potential of certain strategies and tactics. We reject the “diversity of tactics as strategy” approach, because it fetishizes tactics (the nuts-and-bolts activities of a movement), raising them to the level of strategy (a theory of how we will accomplish our goals). We also reject the notion that people needed to be braver, work harder, or believe more, because it makes the same mistake, suggesting that if only more people participated in this or that action it would have succeeded. Even if this is true, what is more helpful is to understand why more people did not participate. The stubborn defense of some tactics—property destruction or the referendum, for instance—falls into a similar trap: it fails to interrogate the successes or failures of the strategies guiding such tactics.
We Make Revolution and the Revolution Makes Us
But how do we weigh the success of any particular strategy? It is too easy to fall into the trap of believing the revolutionary organization is the subject of history and the proletariat the object, as though revolutionaries are directors who have figured it all out and all else are pawns in a chess game or recipients of the benefits of a revolution that is carried out by the few. This mistake is not absent from movements today (though the revolutionary organization might be an organization, scene, tendency, milieu, or network) where revolutionaries enact a strategy upon x,y,z in a linear progression toward the goal of revolution. Of course, as communists we understand that revolution is a dialectical process that requires the largest possible numbers of people. We also understand that we are transformed through the process of struggle itself, which breaks down divisions within the class and prepares us for the active practice of sustained revolution. Or as Marx notes in Theses on Feuerbach, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”
Elsewhere, Unity and Struggle stresses that the role of organizing is to help the class realize its power through collective organizing and confrontation. What this implies is that one measure of success might be who is reorganized and what kind of leadership is produced through the enactment of certain strategies.
Below, we interrogate a few key moments in the movement with two questions: 1. What sections of the class are reorganized through certain strategies and tactics? In other words, how is the movement recomposing the class? And 2. What kind of subject is produced through certain strategies and tactics? In other words, how is the movement building dual power?
1. What sections of the class are reorganized through certain strategies and tactics? In other words, how is the movement recomposing the class?
Since capital organizes us according to its image, the revolutionary process necessarily entails reorganizing ourselves to transform the existing social relations. Composition refers to how people reorganize themselves through the process of struggle to come together as social forces. Salar Mohandesi (2020) explains:
[T]here are moments, such as the recent George Floyd uprisings, when people…re-imagine themselves as agents of change. Instead of dreaming of how things should be, they demand that they must be different. Instead of following the old routines, they experiment with new forms of activity. Instead of passively embracing the identity categories imposed on them, they construct a new kind of subjectivity. Instead of dealing with issues independently, they will seek out other people to help confront a shared problem…The process through which individuals come together as a collective social force is called composition.
By the time domestic terrorism charges came down on forest defenders in December of 2022, a social force was emerging. When protestors chanted “we are all forest defenders” they did so across differences in politics, identities, social locations, and experiences. In the first two years of the movement, conflicts over who was/should be/will be the subject of the movement got ugly at times. But such conflicts, when the most determined were involved, often spurred new phases or branches of the movement. This was a decentralized autonomous movement, after all. Self-correction was possible. If you didn’t like something, you could try to do it better.
One such productive conflict involved racial composition and identification with the movement. Some argued that the movement, as it tried to rekindle the fire of the summer of 2020, deprioritized Black self-determination. If the movement were to carry on the popular militancy of the George Floyd Uprising, then Black militants would need to see themselves in the movement and take on leadership. Early propaganda downplayed racial oppression (likely without awareness) and presented a white voice. For example, the Defend the Forest website omits mentions of race and the 2020 uprising. In a solidarity statement after Tort’s murder, there is no mention of Tort’s race. This is not to say the website makes no mention of race or the 2020 uprising. The FAQs, for instance, discuss disproportionate effects of gentrification, environmental destruction, and police violence on Black residents. It explains “Cop City will hyper-militarize law enforcement, equipping police with a site to train for the suppression of Atlanta’s diverse Black and working-class communities.” But when it goes on to discuss those residents facing disproportionate violence, it leaves the impression that the writers of the website, who are presumably the architects of the movement, and maybe even those being called on to join the movement, are separate from those facing the potential for increased suppression. When it states, “We can understand how residents and community members on the receiving end of this violence and intimidation would be opposed to the forces hoping to increase it,” it separates “we” (writers/movement participants) with the “residents and community members” who might face increased violence.
This is not to say that the writers are white; we don’t know who wrote the website and have no interest in reproducing the old “white anarchist” trope that erases anarchists of color and condemns white anarchists to being always already racist (we believe white anarchists of course are capable of anti-racist praxis). It is to say that the exclusion of an intentional discussion of anti-Black racism on the front page combined with this language may have created the perception of the movement as white, primarily motivated by de-racialized environmental issues over and above racist police violence, for instance. Of course, there is a long history (and present) of Black and Latinx people organizing around issues of land, air, water, and violence, and the authors of the website are likely aware of this. What we want to draw attention to is simply how not connecting, clearly and specifically, the movement for Black lives, the 2020 uprising, and racist policing with the movement to Defend the Forest may have created a situation in which Black working-class people did not see themselves as part of the movement from the beginning. While white militants may have implicitly understood the movement as anti-racist, Black locals, learning from a long history of racism being cast as secondary or dropped altogether in movements, may have paused at the exclusion of explicit and frequent mentions of anti-racism. This perception of the movement as a white movement may have been further exacerbated as Black participants entered a movement in which white people sometimes clumsily dismissed critiques around race.
Instead of staying marred in conflict around whiteness (which ultimately centers whiteness and white people), endlessly criticizing how some people were organizing, or rejecting the movement entirely, some chose to take actions to transform the racial composition of the movement. We can imagine both that Black militants were leaders in the movement from the beginning and that ongoing efforts to support Black participation and leadership were bolstered by intentional efforts. One such effort may have been the emergence of a new website, stopcop.city, which made explicit the movement’s commitment to anti-racism. The new website operated as a kind of self-correction to center antiracism: it offered an alternative language for the movement, including a catchy chant, which helped expand participation beyond the realm of typical far left organizing in Atlanta and elsewhere.
If we take seriously that millions more people are needed for revolutionary transformation, then our organizing should aim to expand participation as much as possible. Organizing that supported such efforts, such as the Weelaunee Coalition, the “Singing Ourselves Together” festival, the Muscogee Stomp Dance, the rally for Black Atlantans, etc. helped diversify the faces of the movement to attract broader layers of people while also actually building power across socioeconomic and geographic differences. Efforts such as those to get organs of official society (the King Center, universities, etc.) to stand against Cop City and/or the repression of the movement sought to divide the enemy by cutting off the support it relies on to uphold hegemony. These organizing efforts should not be thought of as secondary to sabotage, direct action, or occupation.
In the complex class society we live in, it will take far more than the subproletariat to make revolution. It should be noted that the homeownership rate in the US is over 65%; in Georgia it’s over 67%. As of 2024, close to 48% of adults 25 or older have some kind of college degree. Taken together, we might conclude that we need large numbers of college-educated homeowners to, at the very least, reject fascism. That we were greeted with neighbors’ cheers of support (or joined by them) when we marched through the gentrified East Atlanta neighborhood was made possible through the un-sexy organizing dedicated to expanding participation and identification with the movement. Long, hard conversations in meetings, at teach-ins, over meals helped ensure that instead of the movement diluting its ideals, participants who may have been pre-disposed to respectable forms of protest appreciated the merits of sabotage. Supporting their direct organizing helped them exercise their agency to self-organize in their communities.
2. What kind of subject is produced through certain strategies and tactics? In other words, how is the movement building dual power?
Despite our early concerns, we can admit that the campaign to force a referendum to put the Cop City land lease on the city ballot had some merits. By collecting over 100 thousand signatures, it made perhaps tens of thousands of people aware of Cop City. At a moment when other wings of the movement were facing heavy repression, it continued to breathe new life into the movement. Yet, the daily activity of the referendum campaign produced passive subjects, at most able to participate in electoral politics. For volunteers, they learned to knock on doors to collect signatures, using people as warm bodies for an agenda. For signers, they learned about the issue and were immediately handed an excuse to do nothing—putting their signature down accomplished their civic duty. While some would argue that the referendum campaign was pushing for direct democracy (“let the people decide”), we should remember that direct democracy requires far more than a signature. The campaign failed to facilitate practice in collective decision-making and problem-solving. It reproduced liberalism while claiming to reveal its limits. In the end, it failed to even confront state power—city hall still has refused to count the signatures nearly two years later.
In contrast to this, efforts to encourage direct action (Stop Reeves Young, the campaign against Nationwide, etc.), attempted to make militants by calling people into self-directed actions against contractors and insurance companies. Yet, because planning these actions was often dangerous and required a high level of trust, it’s likely these efforts tended to reproduce socially typical anarchists.
A third initiative—one of the few local initiatives during the referendum campaign—was Block Cop City. With a bold proposal to march onto the site of Cop City and stop construction, advocates toured the country and invited people to join. After several months of hype and planning, a few hundred people marched towards the site and clashed with police about a half mile away before dispersing. Similarly to Stop Reeves Young (SRY), this action had people practice direct confrontation. Different from SRY, because more participatory planning was possible (large local assemblies were held in the days preceding the action), this action could include broader layers of people, including those with little protest experience.
Yet, many local organizers, not understanding the strategy behind it or exhausted by anti-repression support work, chose to sit out the planning of Block Cop City. Despite the principle of non-condemnation, internal distrust was heightened by ongoing repression, exhaustion, and the lack of relationship building efforts across crews/milieus/organizations. Locals were aware that it would take many thousands of people to actually break through police lines and enter the site. People questioned why an impossible plan was being promoted as possible. Surely organizers couldn’t have thought they would attract many thousands of people when they didn’t even have the support of half of the local movement. Instead of blaming the failure of Block Cop City on low participation due to individuals’ lack of will or faith, we believe that strategic and relational limitations explain the low participation.
We give credit to Block Cop City (and the weekly pickets at the construction site, etc.) for attempting to do something in the wake of repression and a stalled referendum campaign. We also wonder what would have been possible if the movement had previously produced many more organizers who were capable of stepping in and planning new fronts when movement vets were burnt out. Despite the talk of sustainability, the movement actually involved a significant amount of voluntarism, at least by local organizers. In the future, we hope we can organize smarter, not harder, prioritizing strategies that can produce many more organizers capable of thinking through strategy, recruiting new participants, and facilitating self-activity to prepare an increasingly expanding and diversifying “us” for confrontation with the state.
The New Terrain
Cop City is built; that is an objective condition. Cop City is part of the current terrain, both as a terrain of struggle and as a map of the complex conditions that have brought us to this moment, or this conjuncture. To confront this terrain as such, we turn to conjunctural analysis. Conjunctural analysis, as a method of mapping social terrain, seeks to understand a specific moment or political situation by examining the dynamic interplay of the political, social, historical, economic, and ideological forces that shaped that particular moment. A conjunctural moment, defined by its temporality, can be an intensified conflict, collision of rupture points, or fracture in the structures that uphold power. While capitalism is a long-term structural set of conditions, specific conflicts, crises, or unstable/volatile moments arise under those conditions that expose how power operates and open space to reorganize the social conditions. The consequences of those rupture points can be political transformation (given the right conditions, revolution, for example), a re-entrenchment of pre-existing power imbalances through repression and backlash, or some combination of tensions between the two, as exemplified by the Cop City struggle.
The Cop City struggle, as it brings conflicts and power into sharper focus, represents a rich site for conjunctural analysis of the future of revolutionary work. To navigate this terrain, we map the conditions that produced it as we attempt to do here. This summary offers an insufficient, broad-strokes take on the current state of U.S. capitalism through the lens of this specific conjuncture.
Since the 1970s, capitalism has been in a long secular crisis with falling rates of profit. While neoliberalism arose as a solution to crisis, it has also produced periodic crises. The market and housing crash in 2008-2009 was a result of bloated fictitious markets after decades of slowing accumulation in productive capital. In response, governments doubled down on bailing out capital and further immiserating the working class. In the U.S., recovery tended towards precarious low-wage job creation while working class debt grew larger than it was before the crash. Real surpluses continued to stagnate as investment flowed into fictitious markets, propping up markets at the expense of investment in the social reproduction of the class. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the 2020 uprising during COVID-19 pandemic reflected the crisis in the class relation and revealed the limits of war patriotism, rugged individualism, and “law and order” to uphold hegemony.
On the other hand, Unity and Struggle argues elsewhere the rise of Trump represents this deepening impasse in neoliberalism resulting from the secular crisis:
As capital works to counteract falling profit rates by contracting social reproduction, it faces a growing problem of legitimacy. Delegitimation deepened slowly but steadily for years and fractured the consensus below the neoliberal order. Now the rise of Trump represents a sudden expansion of these fractures, which extend, like cracks in a windshield, deep into the state. And the upsurge of right-wing nationalist populism that accompanies Trump’s presidency foreshadows even further ruptures, as it lays the conditions for a fascist politics that could sustain capitalist retrogression by devouring bourgeois democracy itself.
While the exact shape of our current crisis is yet unfolding, and we can’t predict the precise outcomes, the set of conditions that gave rise to these compounding crises indicates that the system is no longer holding. As Marxists, we know that capitalism is inherently unsustainable and will inevitably collapse. That system collapse is here, and it has been uneven and ongoing across the globe. Collapse, as in rupture, contains both reactionary and liberatory possibilities. These compounding crises of collapse could be weaponized to consolidate power (arguably what’s happening now). Or, these crises could renew our subjectivity through struggle as we build capacity for organized interventions that ultimately lead to a revolution.
Cop City, and the cropping up of Cop Cities nationally, is an expression of crisis that serves to consolidate power by doubling down on militarization and austerity. Trump II policies are transforming the role of the state by abandoning social welfare, giving up on ‘soft power’ approaches to geopolitical stability, supplanting the power of state and municipal governments with federal government, and further gutting the working class and rewarding the mega-rich. Cop City is a concrete example of the abandonment of social welfare and the increase in militarized control that characterizes the rising fascism of the conjunctural moment we face.
Fascism is an academically contested concept; here, we approach fascism descriptively and actively by examining it in its various historical forms. Fascism has both endemic and iterative forms under capitalism. As George Jackson observed, fascism is capitalism’s default setting. From the early phases of capitalism through to the unfolding late-stage degenerate phase it’s in now, fascism is endemic to capitalism. Yet it also assumes particular forms shaped by specific historical crises.
This conjuncturally specific, iterative form takes on world-historical significance through Aimé Césaire’s “terrific boomerang effect,” where colonial and imperial violence returns home in the form of fascism. The U.S. simultaneously projects power abroad (proxy wars, sanctions, etc.) while intensifying domestic warfare through the continued expansion of policing, militarization, repression, border regimes, and austerity, which are manifestations of this returning violence (like Cop Cities).
This iterative form of fascism is world-historically armed, genocidal, and terroristic, and simultaneously desperate, ideologically belligerent, and culturally bankrupt. With this particular rise of fascism, in/as response to system collapse, the pretense of democracy is discarded in favor of open terror, as evidenced by the genocide in Palestine, ICE occupation, etc.
If this form of fascism is capitalism’s terminal crisis and the decline of US hegemony, then it produces a volatile situation. On the one hand, the US attempts to compensate for its decline through fascist escalation. On the other hand, the decline and desperation create vulnerabilities that can be strategically exploited. The escalation of fascism and the vulnerability of system collapse appear to be co-constitutive, and we can organize strategically around both. We can consciously build capacity to transform these crises into revolutionary possibilities, rather than letting collapse consolidate fascism and foreclose the execution of our collective power.
Future movements should ask: What forms of resistance and organization can we create to both withstand this violence and to construct alternative infrastructures capable of exploiting systemic fractures when they emerge?
A manifestation of the rise of fascism is the expansion and increased militarization of policing. Not much has changed about the fundamental nature of policing, namely to protect property and capital and to repress dissent through violence, but its reach expands both domestically and internationally as police forces, at times, lift off from the state as semi-autonomous institutions. And while the military and the police have always had the same ontological foundation, their increasing convergence reflects a particular crisis of capital taking form as the “terrific boomerang” of imperial violence. For example, the design of Cop Cities emulates domestic civilian life, priming the police to interact with day-to-day life as a military war zone and staging the rehearsal for domestic warfare as US forces abroad have for decades. This imperial boomerang effect manifests not just in the militarization of policing domestically; it also manifests in the circulation of the doctrines and practices of the US police globally (Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange [GILEE], decades of brutal US-backed policing in El Salvador, legacies of CIA-backed militarized “regime change,” etc.).
Local conditions also inform the expansion and intensification of policing. Atlanta’s Cop City is, in part, the result of a police strike in 2020 and independent funding from oligarchs with regional ties (mostly in the wealthy Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta). The police strike and the potential succession of Buckhead were both used to discipline the municipal government into backing the oligarch’s plans. The Police Foundation was able to organize its money and force matched investments from the state.
Movements may increasingly face semi-autonomous police forces, sometimes directed by the capitalist class without state mediation and sometimes acting on their own authority, while the state will likely continue to deploy the military against domestic protests (whether or not the police are obeying the state).
The militarization of the police also serves a repressive function. Policing and repression are interrelated yet distinct functions of preserving the social relations of capital. Distinguishing the key functions of the different state apparatuses is strategically important if we are to exploit the vulnerabilities of our enemy’s position. Policing is a long-term structural institution of capital that operates through violence both physically (police brutality, prisons, protection of property over humanity) and psychologically (daily habituation to disempowerment, respectability in the face of alienation, the psychological impacts of surveillance, etc). Repression performs a more reactive function; it is a response or reaction to real, perceived, or imagined threats to capital. Repression is also less institutionally sequestered than policing; repression mobilizes the state’s coercive resources across agencies (police, military, intelligence). Because repression is a reactive function, it is executed in responsive/adaptive ways to the real or perceived threat at hand as both crisis management and to justify the state’s violence after the fact (“counterinsurgency,” for example).
Repression may represent an internal crisis where the state is (or purports to be) on the defensive, exposing a vulnerability or rupture point within the system itself. Identifying predictable patterns of repression can not only help us protect one another from the impacts of repression, but it can also help us exploit those rupture points.
Understanding the particular function of repression also moves us beyond the fallacy that “repression means we’re winning” when we are clearly not winning. While repression may indicate the potential of a movement to be disruptive, the state’s claim that it is threatened or somehow victimized should not be mistaken for a victory. The monopoly on violence is still very much intact, and mistaking repression for our power could inadvertently obscure the real power imbalances at hand. This misreading of power also risks displacing responsibility for the state’s violence and accidentally shifting it onto ourselves, thereby reproducing the state’s deflective narrative that resistance “provokes” repression. With this in mind, our work is to still push at the limits of power. These institutions are not omnipotent, and they should not be treated as such. However, pushing at the limits of state power without a sober power analysis, a concrete and adaptable strategy, and an objective capacity for mutual protection could lead to unnecessary sacrifices. And, we don’t want to make our comrades cannon fodder by making unnecessary moves or simply not thinking through power.
The results of state repression are variable. The long-term result of state repression in the US has been fairly predictable: the state represses dissent and then systematically absorbs the tactics and goals of a movement as a mechanism to preserve control while (only maybe) temporarily conceding to a non-threatening demand (that it will eventually roll back) and ultimately pacifying dissent. However, state repression, while predictable in neoliberal execution and long-term outcome, can yield inconsistent political results in the immediate, ever-changing conditions of the present. One variable is the political cost of that repression. In the past, when public visibility of brute violence and movement resilience is high, repression has backfired, alienating the public and strengthening opposition. But the present conditions of the rise of fascism, coupled with hyper-surveillance (including social media), have naturalized a kind of mediated daily exposure to violence that could potentially desensitize or distract the public to the visibility of state violence, consequently reducing the political cost of repression. Whether or not repression is politically costly is bound to the social conditions under which it is enacted, offering us the opportunity to generate conditions that make repression look just as bad as it is.
For the Stop Cop City movement, repression undoubtedly disrupted the movement and fractured organizations, but it failed to achieve the goal of complete dissolution. The movement overall created more revolutionary subjectivities that were not lost due to the pressures of repression. That is a significant and underrated success to carry forward.
With the movement to Stop Cop City somewhere between our recent past and the ongoing present, repression has not proven to be an unsustainable or politically costly strategy for the state, in part because the movement was unable to generate a counter-hegemonic narrative that sufficiently raised the stakes. However, this calculus remains unstable. Unfolding variables, such as the protracted RICO trial, the criminalization of basic protest/dissent, and the broader context of rising fascism, retain the potential to transform state violence into political liability. This potential to alter the conditions that make repression costly or beneficial to the state is, in itself, a terrain of struggle to strategize around.
We need to increase the stakes of repression for the state while becoming resilient against repression ourselves. Anti-repression activity should focus on building broad bases of support among everyday people.
The difficulty of imposing a political cost on the state stems partly from the movement’s unclear orientation toward liberal democracy. Our organizational capacity has not grown enough to coalesce as a formative political bloc explicitly against the ruling class, a problem clarified but not necessarily addressed by the Cop City struggle. The strategic choices and legacies of more recent leftist movements in the US have, no doubt, informed the politics of the Stop Cop City movement. The anti-globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street of the 2000s rejected formal organization in favor of ad hoc networks, project-based working groups, affinity groups, and loose coalitions. The orientation toward decentralization was reproduced in the movement, and, at times, even pushed against the formal organization of a political bloc. This lack of clarity strains our ability to know if the subjectivities and lessons created through movement will reemerge and renew in the next round of struggle.
Decentralization, it was thought, would provide protection from repression. But the RICO case claimed conspiracy anyway. Decentralization may come up against a need for tighter organization and more coherent strategies.
For roughly a decade, social movements in the US have largely failed to extract meaningful concessions from the state. While Democrats at times still seek legitimacy from civil society institutions, they do so less frequently and with less fervor. Many have found the very failure of liberalism, its refusal to provide basic social supports or offer political concessions, to be a radicalizing force. However, the durability and power of the state’s ideology coupled with the material persuasiveness of a liberal, consumer identity, has maintained the passive consent of a critical portion of the population.
However, some degree of erosion of liberal legitimacy was evident in the Stop Cop City movement. The Democratic mayor of Atlanta was willing to disobey the will of civil society institutions (the King Center, environmental nonprofits) that previous Democratic administrations relied on to maintain legitimacy. Trumpism builds its own base from which it seeks legitimacy: global oligarchs and domestic conspiracy theorists. As the immiseration of the working class deepens, the function of politics is brought into sharper focus: the relationship between democracy and American politics is severed. Formal political paths (voting, legislation, the referendum, etc) for popular movements are possible, but they are extremely resource-intensive and largely not effective.
The movement shot its shot with liberal democracy with the referendum effort to put Cop City on the ballot. The referendum predictably failed to achieve its ends and likely diffused the power that was building in the movement. The referendum was announced precisely when the movement recognized the limitations of formal democratic channels through a powerful display of popular dissent at a city council meeting on June 5, 2023. It was, if measured by numbers, momentum, and energy, a high moment for the movement where real oppositional power was cohering. It was cohering precisely in its abandonment of liberal democracy and its ineffective political channels. In that powerful, politically ripe moment, a small group of nonprofit staffers reset the clock, making one last bid to formal democratic processes. This test of liberal strategy, as opposed to building power against it through struggle together, deflated the activated oppositional energy of the movement. In the end, when the referendum inevitably failed, there was proof, once again, that popular movements do not equate to power in a neoliberal political terrain.
It is through struggle that we find and expand our limits. It is through active participation that clarifies the right moment to push.
In the future, for movements to feel powerful and not defeated, formal political paths to concessions should be rejected during movement highs, on our terms. We celebrate movements turning away from placing demands on the state for redistribution and civil rights and should be vigilant against small groups attempting to forge unstrategic paths that affect the movement as a whole.
For movements to move strategically, open and public debate should be prioritized over a fetishism of a diversity of tactics and concerns about condemnations that do not put people at risk from state repression.
While the movement proved to be disruptive and generative of revolutionary subjectivities that could undermine the legitimacy of liberal democracy, the movement did not create a robust counter-hegemonic force to break the hold of the state’s ideological apparatuses, as evidenced by participation in liberal politics. This is not to argue against efforts to draw in popular support, but rather a critique of how we do that and what outcomes we seek (revolutionary or reformist). After all, our goal was never to simply stop Cop City but to mobilize people around a common cause towards a revolutionary horizon, and that requires an ideological shift away from liberal democracy.
The ideological terrain of the struggle remains under-developed. The ideological terrain is changed by the movement, even if marginally, and this was achieved through both internal struggle (conflict, critique, synthesis) and external confrontation (protests, sabotage). But this represents more of a rupture than a crystallizing of organized counter-hegemony. Drawing attention to this weakness offers opportunities for strategic analysis on how and through what organizational forms we might expand counter-hegemony.
Largely, the Stop Cop City movement failed to intentionally organize through a counter-hegemonic lens. If we understand that the ruling class utilizes both ideological/cultural hegemony, as well as brute force, as mechanisms of coercion and control to reproduce its own power, we too can utilize ideology (via sustained counter-hegemony) to reproduce revolutionary consciousness. Understood through Gramsci’s “war of position,” ideology is a terrain of struggle where cultural interventions turn into sites of dual power. Culture, as a site of struggle, is not in opposition to the militancy or force required for revolution, but rather a counter-hegemonic cultural force is in a more complex dialectical relationship where we build power through both force and consent, and not one or the other.
Culture is an essential terrain of struggle that often gets undermined from nearly every direction. To clarify its strategic value: this is not the realm of countercultural aesthetics, nor the reduction of politics to consumer choices, nor a soft, liberal enemy of revolutionary force. Cultural work is neither expendable nor is it fundamentally revolutionary. Cultural work has the potential to shape consciousness, kinship, and objective conditions when strategically supported by revolutionary frameworks. For example, prefigurative politics (embodying the liberatory future we want to see through our actions in the present) demonstrates how cultural work can simultaneously prefigure concrete alternatives to capitalist social reproduction and shift consciousness from individualism toward collectivity. Social reproduction theory demonstrates how cultural-political work can disrupt capitalism’s life-sustaining labor, such as care work, education, and community-building, into terrains of struggle where both consciousness and material conditions are remade. Together, along with counter-hegemony, they form a basis for counter-power. But, absent a revolutionary framework, cultural work risks being co-opted or mistaken as sufficient in itself to challenge power.
Whether we choose to acknowledge the value of cultural work and social reproduction, this work sustained the movement. Through mutual aid networks, care clinics, and bail funds, the movement was able to reproduce itself, even under immense pressure. Collective care, ideological critique, and conflict resolution sustained movement cohesion against state violence. Cultural events and snarky social media campaigns strengthened social bonds, sustained morale, and brought new people in: come for the fun, stay for the struggle. It’s not a matter of if cultural work is the “real” struggle or simply ancillary to the “real” work, cultural work constitutes the very terrain upon which revolutionary capacity is built.
With this understanding, the cultural terrain should be as heavy a focus as the terrain of attack (sabotage, direct action).
This conjunctural moment encompasses many complex interconnected crises, not all of which can be covered here. Significantly, the climate crisis, as it pertains to this moment, is absent and a subject worthy of an article on its own. Atlanta’s longer historical arc is absent, although it informs this moment now. Every element that contributes to this conjuncture, whether understood through the lens of repression, ideology, history, or culture, etc., contains traces of every other element in a communion that is this polycrisis. And situated within this is Weelaunee Forest, the sacred land that gives us continuity in struggle.
The land holds our stories, past and future; land is never a single moment, but rather a convergence of every moment, a historical record and context for struggle. We can pluck a conjuctural moment from our collective social timeline, but the land offers a sense of ecological and historical process. Something we can return to again and again to know where we are, where we have been, and where we might go, a story. We are so much a part of this story that we can repair our estranged relationship to the land and situate ourselves not outside of it, but as a relational part of its ecology. The Stop Cop City movement had some of those moments. Up to this day, Weelaunee softly pulses with a kind of movement energy. Much quieter now than in 2022, but we are all still there. The land remembers every struggle, and the land remembers every forest defender. We are part of the terrain.
The War Continues
This reflection is one of many emerging at the end of the Stop Cop City movement. Already, revolutionaries in the US are changing their activity based on lessons from the movement. Some have encouraged guerrilla activity, some have embraced nihilism, and some have tried to hold onto the crumbs of the movement to maintain continuity. More promising, some are seeking to grow the capacities and composition of movements through building organizers capable of reproducing movements in the Let’s Go! project and other North American anarchists have turned towards building cadre for a revolutionary organization. We celebrate these turns towards organizing and organization and hope that they succeed.
We offer this reflection because we thought that important lessons from the movement were missing. We hope the lesson will not be to embrace a diversity of tactics nor for people to simply sacrifice more. We should remember that the revolution does not just need more people or braver anarchists but needs many more sections of society. The duty of revolutionaries in movements is to reach outwards, outside of our organizations and social networks, in order to expand the capacity of the class. To do so, we must recognize that other sections of the class can and do organize. We can connect with them and offer resources but also learn from them and with them and connect them to each other. In order to do this, we must not only resist the tendency to think of ourselves as the only or most important revolutionary actors, but also learn to organize across differences, to appreciate and help develop the revolutionary impulses and activities of the class.
In the spirit of learning from each other, we invite further analysis, including challenges to our own analysis, in order to sharpen our tools for the next battle.
See you out there.
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