Casting Fire

or: A Study in How Social Movements Succeed or Fail

This week as I write this, students and faculty are occupying their universities to demand those institutions disinvest from the genocide being committed by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people. They’ve already withstood violent repression, incarceration, and widespread slander, but the movement is currently growing.

Yesterday, I spoke remotely to a class at the New School in New York that had just read my utopian novella A Country of Ghosts. I’ve spoken to a bunch of classes assigned that book over the years, talking about the ways in which the utopian imagination is useful, the ways in which it is dangerous. Yesterday, the professor wrote me ahead of time to say “we should do it differently.” The New School was occupied, and a great number of the students in the class were participating. So the classroom was opened to anyone who wanted to come.

I didn’t, and don’t, have any tactical or strategic leadership to offer that movement. I’m not part of it. I’m not a student, I’m not faculty. I’m not too much of an organizer at all these days, besides my weekly meetings with a publishing collective. But I have been involved actively in anarchist politics since 2002 and have for the past several years run a twice-weekly podcast about radical social movements in history.

So I talked about my book, sure, but I also answered questions as best as I could about social movements and their trajectories. We talked about things that have worked and things that haven’t. We wound up talking about the common trajectories of social movements, their rise, their fall, their aftermath. One day there might be a polished version of this essay, one that I can stand behind more solidly. Maybe it will even have charts and graphs. But for now, these are just some ideas, of the stages of repression that social movements face on their way to becoming revolutions.

Throwing Sparks

Starting a social movement is like building a campfire with flint and steel: you need to gather tinder and you need to throw sparks, and you’ll never know which sparks will catch. Sometimes, but not always, the sparks are thrown by committed political actors—the sorts of radicals who see political change as their primary activity. At least as often, it’s spontaneous, and the political actors rush to catch up. The tinder is the larger mass of people—people who might care just as deeply as the radicals, but whose lives have a different focus. The social conditions translate in this metaphor to the weather conditions—it’s a lot easier to catch sparks in dry air, but sometimes you need a campfire regardless of the weather so you’re going to try anyhow.

You throw sparks by throwing protests—ideally, by organizing direct actions. You throw sparks by trying, time and time again, to call for strikes, occupations, blockades, rallies, treesits, or whatever sort of direct action suits you. We try this every day. Around the country and world, every day there are small protests and actions. You never know when they’ll move from spark to flame. You can analyze the material conditions, but this is more divination than science. There’s an art to it, a feel to it, and the most experienced organizers in the world are still regularly surprised by which sparks catch and which ones don’t.

When you build a fire, it makes sense to gather not only tinder but also kindling and fuel. These are represented within this metaphor by building revolutionary—or at least movement-focused–infrastructure such as unions, social centers, subcultural spaces, and mutual aid organizations. These sorts of organizations rarely provide the spark or tinder but are ready to show up with fuel once the fire has caught.

An example of throwing sparks was the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011 that generalized across the USA. In retrospect, it looked inevitable that that particular spark caught—there had been plaza occupations around the world all year, and we were three years into a major recession that could justifiably be blamed on Wall Street. It seemed, in retrospect, like “an idea whose time had come.” And it was. But that exact model of protest had been tried time and time again to no effect. This time, the sparks caught.

There are plenty more steps you have to take, plenty more obstacles you have to overcome, before this results in meaningful social change.

Blown Out

We probably won’t be able to keep with this campfire metaphor forever, but let’s take it another step. You threw a protest and suddenly it’s looking like it might become a movement. Your campus occupation has survived its first night and more people are joining besides the ten of you who called for the thing and your twenty friends you peer pressured into coming.

The first response from power is usually (not always) to simply crush you without fanfare, to blow out the fire you’ve lit. After all, usually this works. Most small fires are easily blown out, before the tinder can catch the kindling. Our metaphor holds strong here though, because it’s the very act of blowing on a fire that provides it oxygen. A delicate flame can be put out, while a more robust one will grow stronger.

The state will do this initial repression by showing up with cops and arresting enough people to intimidate everyone else into leaving. Sometimes it’s a mass arrest—they throw everyone into jail for a night and hope that teaches people their lesson. This is literally, of course, the state playing with fire. (Well, metaphorically, I suppose. It’s literally the metaphor.) Most of the time, this repression ends the action before it becomes a movement.

When this stamping out backfires, it accomplishes two things that help the action become a movement: first, failed repression will spread the flame: as word spreads about police repression, it either scares everyone into submission or it angers and emboldens people, who will either join the existing action or replicate it elsewhere. Second, spending the night in jail (or facing police violence in the streets) scares some people away, but if the conditions are right, it radicalizes people instead. They learn to—correctly—see themselves as acting upon the historical stage, as being capable of threatening the structures of power.

Recuperation and Repression

When the state can’t immediately and reflexively crush a movement, they move onto the next stage, a one-two punch of recuperation and repression, repeated as necessary. The repression will likely get more violent each time, the recuperation will offer more and more concessions each time—though generally, these concessions are illusory. Whenever recuperation and concessions lead to a movement weakening, instead of growing stronger, the concessions are walked back.

To use Occupy as an example again, in 2011 I was living in Santa Cruz, California, a very economically polarized city with a liberal upper middle class constituency as well as a large working class and unemployed population. Much larger occupations and demonstrations were taking place in nearby Oakland, but we had an encampment of fifty to around two hundred people and general assemblies of roughly the same size. The city first tried to just come in and arrest everyone and clear everyone out. When that didn’t crush the movement, the city council started sending a delegate to our general assemblies to attempt to negotiate with us—and to co-opt the movement and claim they supported it. The lesson to be learned wasn’t “the city council was on our side,” but instead “if you have the numbers and the militancy, you can force the state to at least feign respect for you and come to the bargaining table.”

The 2020 George Floyd uprising is an even more clear example of the destruction of a movement through false promises and concessions: as direct repression continued to fail, the movement was dismantled by promises to defund the police. Basically, the state made the cost of continuing in the movement higher and higher, while claiming to have met more and more of our demands leaving us less reason to be out in the streets. Of course, the promise of the repression (lengthy jail sentences) proved to be concrete, while the promise of the concessions proved illusory.

The solution to avoiding recuperation by means of concessions isn’t to refuse to take those concessions, its to prevent ourselves from believing the state is offering those concessions out of good will. When we take reforms as conquered territory, with the goal of growing the movement and asking for even more, then they will have to actually give us the reforms we have demanded. When we accept the reforms and they see that this has mollified us, they will rescind their offer because we no longer have the power to enforce our demands.

Elections are another major force of recuperation. If a Republican is in office, the Democrats can easily offer themselves as the alternative. If a Democrat is in office, the Democrats can slowly offer lip service to progressive ideas. Agents of recuperation attempt to shift the conversation away from direct action and movement building and towards electoral strategies. Which isn’t to say electoral politics have no role within social movements, just that we must not shift our energy away from the movement itself. 

In 1905, people in Russia threw a fairly spontaneous revolution in an attempt to end the autocratic rule by the Tsar. All sorts of Leftist and liberal social movements had been casting sparks for years, and eventually a call for very modest reform by an Orthodox priest was met in a hail of gunfire. Instead of giving up, the people of Russia went harder. They set up counter-institutions, the bottom-up democratic bodies known as the Soviets, and militant unions took over huge chunks of industry. Eventually, however, the Tsar agreed to a switch to constitutional monarchy—a concession. Since this concession stopped the revolution, the people were no longer capable of exerting as much power and the Tsar set up a  sham institution called the Duma that held no power, but a great deal of movement energy shifted towards supporting that sham institution and competing with one another for votes for symbolic positions. Only the hardened revolutionaries were still in revolt, but they had no mass movement to work within anymore. Those groups went underground instead, where they were less successful.

Splintering

As repression and recuperation ramp up, the state plays its most powerful card of all: counterinsurgency. The most famous and well-documented example of this is likely the COINTELPRO program run by the FBI in the 1960s and 70s in the US, with its most famous target being the Black Panthers. Essentially, spies were put into social movements not just to observe but to disrupt. They fostered divisions between groups. They studied the individual leaders of groups and figured out how to exploit their personality flaws.

Part of this counterinsurgency is of course, the famous “agent provocateur,” a spy who sets out to escalate situations at protests in order to justify a crackdown on those movements. This, like most state strategies, is them playing with fire again: quite often, an escalation in tactics is exactly what a movement needs to grow.

What is most effective about infiltration and provocateurs, however, is the distrust that their very existence brings to the movement. One of the most successful counterinsurgency tactics used by the state is “fed-jacketing,” in which a fed accuses someone else of being a fed and watches the chaos ensue.

The details of COINTELPRO were revealed by a group of anti-war burglars who broke into an FBI office and found the files. The FBI has claimed to have shut down COINTELPRO, but there is simply no reason at all to believe they have abandoned this effective tactic.

Social movements have learned, somewhat, to navigate a post-COINTELPRO world. One method to fight fed-jacketing is to not point fingers and suggest someone is acting like a fed, but instead to keep our critiques aimed at the actual unsavory actions someone might be doing. You might say “Hey there, when you constantly derail our decision making, it prevents us from accomplishing our goals,” instead of “I think that guy is a cop, he keeps disrupting our meetings.”

The most effective strategy for countering agent provocateurs, of course, is to simply embrace a diversity of tactics and realize that everyone will be moved to act in different ways. The burning of the police precinct in 2020 was immediately blamed by some on police provocateurs, yet that action had a nationwide approval rating higher than what most politicians have while in office and was in large part responsible for the broadening of the movement. When we support a diversity of tactics, we can declaw provocateurs—if you’re not mad that a window got broken, then your movement won’t be divided when someone inevitably breaks a window.

The Clandestinity Trap

The divisions that the state fosters within our movements are often fatal, and time and time again, the combination of repression and recuperation strips away the larger mass movement from the more radical core of that movement. If the social movement was sufficiently large and impactful, then many of its actors are far too invested to stop. At that point, generally, most people try to move on with their lives while the radical core becomes increasingly radical and desperate. Generally, they move their operations underground, because they no longer can move safely through society. People might move from strikes and occupations to bombings, expropriations (robberies), and targeted violence.

Quite often, these more extreme actions are ethically justifiable (though they are not always). In fact, when the same actions happen within the context of a social movement, it often is the sign that the movement has gone from protest to revolution.

But when clandestine actors are isolated from society, it seems like they generally fail—and generally, wind up dead or in prison.

The social movements of the late 60s and early 70s in the US are an example of this: the splintering of the movement caused by COINTELPRO left a lot of the movement in prison (or dead) even before the mass movement started to accept recuperation. The core found itself isolated and went underground, into formations like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground, whose actions failed to ignite the popular imagination the way that their aboveground militant predecessor groups had managed.

Yet the clandestine actors do manage to have important social impacts. If the groups survive long enough, they can directly carry the flame that ignites the next social movement (removing the need for sparks, because an existing fire is present). More often, the groups themselves don’t survive, but their memory lingers longer and more powerfully in the imagination of the next generation than the less radical and evocative mass movements.

I’ll use two linked examples from Russia. In the 1860s, there was a youth subcultural movement that in many ways mirrors the 1960s hippies—men wore their hair long, women wore masculine clothing, and they were all obsessed with aesthetics and radical philosophy. They tried to go “back to the land”  and organize and live among the peasants whose idyll they idealized. They were the nihilists. The state heavily suppressed them. By the 1870s, what was left of the nihilists moved away from mass movement and subcultural organizing and growing food and towards trying to assassinate the Tsar. They kept at it stubbornly, and they eventually succeeded. This didn’t bring about an era of reform—quite the opposite. Since they had no social base at that point, there was no alternative on offer and the next Tsar simply amplified repression and moved away from social reform. When viewed on a short time scale, this makes the actions of the nihilists a miserable failure.

Yet their actions inspired the next generation of rebels, who threw the 1905 revolution. Which also failed in a similar way: after the Tsar promised reforms, the mass fell out from the movement. The ideologically radical core (primarily Socialist Revolutionaries, Marxists, and anarchists) kept going, moving into a period of mass assassinations and robberies and bombings. These radicals were eventually crushed and most of them died, while some went into exile. For about ten years, Russian radical politics were generally discussed among an exile community rather than happening inside of the empire.

Once again, though, in 1917, the people of Russia rose up, and the recent memory of 1905 was vital to this. I think overall the most important thing that came out of the 1905 revolution was the bottom-up model of the soviets, but a culture of being willing to get your hands dirty and rob the rich and kill autocrats seemed to have helped—in that way, perhaps the doomed clandestine actions have a certain nobility to them. Of course, where the Russian revolution failed was against the final boss of social movements: authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism: the Final Recuperative Force

Social movements have an uphill battle. You’ve survived the initial repression, then you’ve survived the constant one-two punch of repression and recuperation. You’ve survived splintering by refusing to let the more radical elements within your movement be isolated and picked off. You’ve become a full-fledged revolution, combining mass social movements with militant actors who are redistributing property and defending the gains of the revolution.

The final recuperative force generally comes from within the revolutionary movement itself: authoritarianism. It’s Boromir grabbing the ring of power, it’s the Bolsheviks declaring themselves in charge of a pluralistic movement and killing everyone who disagrees with them. 

The purpose of a social revolution is to redistribute power horizontally, but there will always be people who say “yes, and I should be given all of the power so that I can better redistribute it,” rather than continuing to work from the bottom-up model that built the revolution in the first place.

The social movements that have defeated this last recuperative force are the ones that worked to inoculate themselves against authoritarian thinking from the very start: movements that focus on keeping power in workers cooperatives, village councils, or other horizontal decisionmaking bodies. The two most prominent living examples of this are the indigenous communities in Chiapas who organize under Zapatismo and the multi-ethnic revolution happening in Northeastern Syria that calls its system democratic confederalism and is generally referred to as Rojava. Throughout history, we can see plenty of social movements that survived this final challenge as well, such as the anarchist revolutions in Ukraine and eastern Spain. 

Spreading internationally: The actual part no one has quite pulled off yet

Once social movements have made it through this last boss, the authoritarians, there’s one final challenge that remains to them, which is to survive in a world that does not want to see anticapitalist, non-statist visions of the world thrive. In some ways, though, the survival of those groups is less on those within those social movements and more on those of us outside those movements: what will keep Rojava safe is a social revolution within Turkey. What will keep the Zapatistas safe is a social revolution within the US and Mexico. Solidarity is necessary for social movements to become revolutions; it’s also necessary for revolutions to survive on the world stage.

How revolutionary Ukraine fell was not internal conflict but the betrayal of the social revolution in Russia by the Bolsheviks and their subsequent invasion of Ukraine. How revolutionary Spain fell was a failure by the Western powers to support the war against fascism during the Spanish Civil War, combined with, once again, a betrayal of the revolution by the USSR who attempted to seize power and centralize the revolution under their own foreign control.

So… that’s it. That’s all we’ve got to do:

• Cast sparks until we find tinder

• Survive being blown out

• Survive the one-two punch of repression and recuperation

• Prevent the sowing of division by state actors

• Avoid the recuperation by authoritarian forces internal to the revolution

• Hope that our successful revolution sparks others across the world

I figure we can pull it off by, I don’t know, 2030 or so if we really set our minds to it.