Strategizing for Palestinian Solidarity

From CrimethInc

In Atlanta, Georgia, abolitionists and environmentalists have fought for three and a half years to stop the construction of a police militarization facility known as Cop City. The same police that are attempting to crush that movement have trained for decades with Israeli police, exchanging lethal counterinsurgency strategies. In the following text, a Jewish collective that has participated in the struggle to Stop Cop City explains why they are committed to solidarity with Palestinians and what it will take to halt the assault of the Israeli military on Gaza.

The Fayer Collective, a collective of Jewish anarchists, has participated in the fight against Cop City from the beginning as well as confronting fascists throughout the region.

For us, the fight against fascism isn’t about “allyship”; it is a personal and direct fight for our lives. And that knowledge has put a fire in our hearts, as both anarchists and Jews.

-Fayer Collective, Finding Our Own Fire

Now, they are attempting to stop the bloodbath in Gaza. In their own words,

Fayer is a collective of artists, revolutionaries, workers, students, criminals, and free lovers fighting for the earth, the good life, and total liberation. Members of the collective have been participating in the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest since its inception, attending religious practices in the forest such as Shabbat dinners, Sukkot gatherings, purim parties, and other Jewish holidays, forging a spiritual bond between Atlanta’s radical Jewish community and the Weelaunee Forest it seeks to defend. With the renewed Zionist attacks on Gaza and the Palestinian people, which are supported by the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange Program based out of Atlanta, we have found ourselves in the unique situation of being near the inner workings of the machine and its local violence while simultaneously being far from its ruthless campaign for genocide. For this reason, we have decided it is imperative for us to lay out the situation from our perspective and what it means for the Atlanta Forest and Palestinian liberation.

Here, the Fayer Collective explores the protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, arguing that solidarity movements must shift from presenting demands to taking direct action and proposing some models for how to proceed.


The Ceasefire in Gaza Starts Here

In the weeks since Israel declared war on Palestine, people across the world have participated in protests against Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Many of the largest protests have taken place in Europe and the United States, with 70,000 people taking to the streets in London last Saturday to demand an end to Israeli air strikes and the provision of arms to Israel. Protestors in Berlin (where pro-Palestine protests are now banned) clashed with police, who deployed pepper spray, water cannons, and physical force against protestors. Protests in support of Palestine have taken place in most major cities in the United States as well. In Chicago, 25,000 people assembled on October 21. For three weekends in a row, the Palestinian Youth Movement has called demonstrations in Atlanta that brought over 1000 people into the streets to demand an end to the Israeli occupation and the genocidal bombing of Gaza.

As of Thursday, November 2, the Israeli military had killed a reported 9193 Palestinians and wounded at least 32,000. At least half of the dead are civilian non-combatants, including at least 3,760 Palestinian children.

Grassroots support for Palestinians is at an all-time high despite Western politicians’ and war profiteers’ attempts to weaponize Jewish identity against them, outlaw and repress solidarity protests, and rally around Israel’s “right to defend itself.” But to stop the genocide in Gaza, activists in the United States will have to move from demanding a ceasefire to imposing one. This will require a shift from demands that appeal to the consciences of elected officials to tactics that create a political crisis for politicians and disrupt corporations’ ability to profit from the oppression and genocide of Palestinian people.


Demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina shutting down Highway 147 at rush hour on November 2, 2023. At the same time, demonstrators in Philadelphia were shutting down 30th Street Station.


75 Years of War

As a result of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948, 78% of Palestinians’ historic homeland was declared a Jewish state. Approximately 500 Palestinian villages experienced ethnic cleansing and roughly 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. This is essential context for understanding subsequent events such as the Six Day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur/Ramadan War, when a coalition of Arab states attempted to reclaim territory lost in the Six Day War.

On October 7, 2023, the fifty-year anniversary of the beginning of the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War, Hamas militants and other Palestinian groups breached the Gaza border by land, sea, and air in a surprise offensive.1 These attacks left at least 1405 Israelis dead and 5431 injured, including an unknown number of children.2 Hamas besieged several settlements in the territory around Gaza, taking 242 hostages. The Israeli government evacuated the area to regain control from Hamas, then carried out a larger evacuation to create a buffer zone in preparation to for the military invasion that is underway now.

So far, Hamas has released four Israeli civilian hostages. They have announced that they are prepared to release all the hostages in exchange for the return of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, though they reported days ago that “almost 50” hostages had been killed by Israeli air raids.

Before October 7, there were 5200 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli custody, more than 25 times the number of hostages Hamas has taken. Some estimates claim that the total number of Palestinian prisoners has doubled since October 7.

Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza have targeted civilian infrastructure including schools, aid agencies, mosques, and civilian housing units. There has been considerable controversy over whose missile hit the Al-Ahli hospital, but the tragedy illustrates how difficult it is to get information on the suffering taking place in Palestine and how readily Israeli officials will justify any kind of atrocity: shortly after the explosion at the hospital, an aid to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on social media that Israel had bombed the hospital because Hamas combatants were inside, then quickly deleted the post.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have long used military strategies targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. In 2008, Israeli Defense Forces Colonel Gabi Siboni described Israel’s strategy of disproportionate force in the Second Lebanon War of 2006 as a policy of deploying “force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses,” force that “aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.” Part of the Dahiya Doctrine of asymmetric warfare, the strategy of disproportionate force predominantly targets civilian infrastructure rather than enemy combatants, seeking to deter future offensive attacks by tying up the economy and civilian population in lengthy, costly reconstruction processes.

This scorched-earth approach to war can be seen in Israel’s air strikes in Gaza. These attacks on civilian infrastructure appear to represent an intentional strategy in which civilians and the resources they depend on become the primary targets of war. This suggests that the strategy of disproportionate force Israel developed in Lebanon is implicated in the devastating loss of life and life-giving infrastructure in Palestine.


A photograph from Palestine Action showing a protester occupying the roof of Howmet Fastening Systems in Leicester, United Kingdom. Howmet makes components for Israeli F-35s.


“Ceasefire now!”

Protests for Palestinian liberation have taken place in most major cities in the United States, often with thousands of participants. Many of these protests draw a through-line connecting the struggle for Palestinian liberation with the struggle against United States colonialism. Protesters have highlighted the fact that the United States government is the single largest donor to Israel’s military and most of the weapons used to kill Palestinians are manufactured by companies based in the United States.

In Atlanta, protesters have pointed to GILEE (Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange) as a local link between Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and the police violence and repression facing Atlantans. Based out of Georgia State University, GILEE facilitates the international exchange of policing and repression tactics between Georgia police officers and Israeli police forces. Five Atlanta Police Department commanders were scheduled to visit Israel from October 13-21 as part of GILEE.

Activists in Atlanta are acutely aware of the global network of repression linking the Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest movement to the movement for Palestinian liberation. Many have noted that Israeli forces will train at Cop City if it is built. On October 12, 300 Georgia State University students walked out of class to protest GILEE, understanding it as part of a system of “Deadly Exchange.” On October 25, Emory University students organized a walkout of over 100 students to demand that the Emory administration divest from Cop City, the Atlanta Committee for Progress, and the GILEE Program.

The ties between the Atlanta Police Department, Cop City, and Israel’s military forces have become a topic of public scrutiny in Atlanta because of the movement to Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest. But GILEE is just one of dozens of such deadly exchange programs in the United States. Eight years before Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, for example, officers in the Minneapolis Police Department received training from Israeli police forces at a conference in Chicago.

Jewish people living in the United States have also mobilized against the bombardment and invasion of Gaza, urging Biden to call for a ceasefire. The vast majority of these protesters reject Zionism (the movement born at the end of the 19th century to establish a Jewish state in the land of historic Palestine and to support that state by any means necessary) as a component of Jewish identity. Instead, many anti-Zionist Jews embrace the diasporic ethos that Jewish people have embodied for millennia.

One of the largest organizations in the United States calling for Palestinian liberation is Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a Palestine solidarity group founded in 1996. Jewish Voice for Peace sparked controversy in 2019 when the organization officially adopted an anti-Zionist position. On October 18, 2023, in Washington, D.C., Jewish Voice for Peace organized the largest known Jewish-led protest in solidarity with Palestinians. According to JVP, 10,000 people from across the country descended on the National Mall in a “Jews Against Genocide” rally. Nearly 500 Jews—including 25 rabbis—entered the Canon Building at the Capitol wearing shirts bearing the phrase “Not In Our Name” in bold letters. They held a sit-in for over three hours until they were arrested and dragged out in handcuffs.

Jewish Voice for Peace is not the only Jewish-led organization that has emerged in response to decades of violence against Palestinian people. In 2014, the Israeli military launched “Operation Protective Edge,” a military offensive in Gaza that killed more than 2200 Palestinians, over 65% of whom were civilians. In response to those attacks, a small group of Jewish youth who opposed the support American Jewish institutions for the invasion of Gaza founded IfNotNow, a Jewish youth organization based in the United States. The day before JVP demonstrated at the Capitol on October 18, members of IfNotNow blockaded all thirteen entrances of the White House while staff were inside and engaged in minor skirmishes with Secret Service police outside.

Though the number of Jews who have mobilized across the United States over the past four weeks is impressive, neither the demands they have presented nor the devastating civilian death toll in Palestine have swayed the decisions of elected officials.


The Cambridge facility of the arms dealer Elbit System sprayed in red paint on October 16, 2023 in solidarity with those suffering in Palestine.


How to Start a Ceasefire

Recent demonstrations against the genocide in Palestine demonstrate nationwide popular support for Palestinian liberation among Jews and non-Jews alike. If these demonstrations have failed to end the attacks on Palestinians, it is because they are intended to appeal to the consciences of politicians whose support for Israel is based not on moral evaluations, but on economic calculations. Elsewhere, groups fighting for Palestinian liberation have begun to create an economic crisis for war profiteers by targeting the corporations that benefit from the bombing and invasion of Gaza.

Active in both the United Kingdom and the United States, a group called Palestine Action has targeted the weapons manufacturing company Elbit Systems, which supplies 85% of Israel’s drone fleet. On October 12, activists in Cambridge, Massachusetts splattered red paint on the front of an Elbit office before locking themselves together to blockade the entrance. Palestine Action recently announced its United States launch with a Zoom webinar on October 24 to explain their strategy, targets, and tactics. Early that same morning, activists targeted Intercontinental Real Estate, which owns the office building rented to Elbit in Cambridge. According to one report, they “smashed Intercontinental’s intercom box clear off the wall, covered the front wall of Intercontinental Real Estate’s Brighton office in red paint, and spray-painted ‘Evict Elbit’ in large black letters.”

According to reporting by Globes, Elbit’s stock prices have dropped by nearly 10% since October 7, while other weapons manufacturers have seen a 5-17% increase in the same period.

Earlier this year, Palestine Action forced a factory belonging to Elbit subsidiary UAV Defence Systems to permanently close after activists besieged it for 60 days straight. The group also forced Elbit to sell their Oldham-based subsidiary Ferranti in January 2022 after 18 months of sustained direct action at the factory. Six months later, the company permanently closed their London headquarters after the fifteenth direct action at the site.

In addition to targeting Elbit Systems and their subsidiaries, Palestine Action has also carried out a strategy of tertiary targeting, organizing actions at the offices and warehouses of companies with economic links to Elbit. Tertiary targeting puts pressure on a project’s core contractors by pressuring businesses that have less of a stake in the project to sever ties with them. Tertiary targeting was also utilized by the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign of the early 2000s and the Stop Reeves Young campaign of the Stop Cop City movement.

Movements in the United States have long used tactics such as blockades, home and office demonstrations, sit-ins, vandalism, and sabotage to take action against wars abroad. In the last month, targeted actions against war profiteers such as Elbit Systems and their subsidiaries show that popular anti-colonial sentiment can be channeled into effective action by striking at the economic heart of the processes that make war possible, rather than the consciences of elected officials. Thousands of miles away from the genocide in Palestine, everyday people in the United States may feel powerless to end Israel’s devastating attacks. But in fact, activists living in the colonial core have the power to directly disrupt the functioning of the institutions and war profiteers who benefit from genocide in Gaza.


A map of potential protest targets from Palestine Action US. “If you’re east of the Mississippi, you live within three hours of an office or factory of Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapons company, the target of our international direct action campaign.”



Publisher’s Afterword: The Uses and Limits of Tertiary Targeting

In the assessment of the SHAC campaign that we prepared with participants in that movement following a wave of repression that left many of the core organizers in both the United States and the United Kingdom serving prison terms, we argued that tertiary targeting strategies were more likely to succeed against smaller targets than Huntingdon Life Sciences, the animal testing corporation that the SHAC campaign set out to drive out of business. Before the SHAC campaign, an earlier movement using the same strategy had successfully shut down an individual fur store; but in attempting to close Huntingdon Life Sciences, which was then Europe’s largest animal testing corporation, activists picked a particularly high-profile target. Every time the campaign came close to shutting down HLS, government agencies stepped in to bail out the company.

Our conclusion was that

it would probably be wise for the next ones who experiment with the model to set smaller goals, rather than even more ambitious ones, since the SHAC campaign itself has yet to succeed. Perhaps some unexplored middle ground awaits between shutting down individual fur stores and attempting to close Europe’s largest animal testing corporation.

Despite this, most subsequent efforts to utilize the SHAC model have taken on larger adversaries, including transnational capitalist infrastructure projects and corporations working with the Atlanta city government to construct Cop City. When state infrastructure is at stake, government agencies will almost always intervene to protect corporations and other institutions from the consequences of tertiary targeting. To be capable of cutting off all resources to major players in the military-industrial complex, a movement would have to be powerful indeed.

This is not necessarily an argument against tertiary targeting. Rather, it is a reminder to set realistic expectations and formulate achievable goals. Even if it is not possible to run all the world’s weapons companies out of business one after another (at least—not without social change on an even larger scale), providing a horizon for more confrontational actions could offer additional leverage on the politicians and other decision-makers who are currently providing the Israeli military with carte blanche to carry out ethnic cleansing. Expanding the range of strategies that activists can participate in and the number of targets they can identify could open up new theaters of operation—giving new participants local points of intervention, escalating the intensity of ongoing protests, and increasing the pressure on those who hold the power to staunch the flows of weapons and blood.

Jewish demonstrators expressing solidarity with Palestinians by shutting down Highway 147 in Durham, North Carolina at rush hour on November 2, 2023. In Durham and elsewhere around the United States, the highway blockades carried out by the movement for Black lives that burst onto the national stage with the Ferguson uprising in 2014 set a precedent for actions that we now see other movements employing.


  1. According to one source, the Israeli military estimates that at least “3000 militants” participated in the attack.

  2. Some reports suggest that some Israelis were killed by Israeli forces on October 7, whether as a consequence of “heavy crossfire” or of “shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

There are 22 Comments

"75 Years of War - As a result of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948, 78% of Palestinians’ historic homeland was declared a Jewish state. Approximately 500 Palestinian villages experienced ethnic cleansing and roughly 700,000 Palestinians became refugees"

Just one question for the hardcore believers of this contrived BS historical narrative: did the Third Reich and the Holocaust happened?

The Nabka was a military *defeat*, at the outcome of a war between two opposite nationalist factions. One just turned to be better equipped, organized, skilled and supported. Also less interested in ethic and religious purity...

yeah one was backed by the fucking british the other was just trying to keep their homes from some europeans.

The British were split about which side to support and which to placate, depending on internal British politics as well as broader imperial policies. During the Arab Revolt the Brits were anti-Arab, but right after the final suppression of the general strike they issued a white paper severely limiting Jewish immigration. During WWII British imperial policy mandated a marginally pro-Jewish policy due to almost every Arab nationalist leader and movement had aligned with the Nazis. It's also true that the Arab League would never have been able to field as large an army as they had in 1948 without being trained and armed by the British. Imperial policy was typically divide and conquer; it makes no sense to blame the British for supporting the zionists when their policies had pingponged all over the place.
Also, not all Jewish people can be considered European, even if almost all the zionist leadership were.

just trying to keep their homes from some europeans.

Afaik, German Nazis were full Europeans... Same for the British Empire that has run Palestine for 30 years.

Beyond this, I'll just second Anon 12:57, as indeed the British have supported both sides of the conflict, and are responsible for building up Pan-Arab nationalism in the first place -before it specifically became Palestinian nationalism- during the Mandate. All of this mess has to do with Western empires, as the Modern notion of states were completely foreign to the Arab world back in the '20s.

The co-option of local rebellions and opposition movements was the achievement of both British and German empires in the first half of the 20th century, if not before, and usually they took the form of nationalism.

This utterly unconvincing....just more opportunistic Crimethinc. propaganda pretending to understand the complexity of geo-political events that are beyond their comprehension and/or ability to do anything about!

I didn't personally find this CrimethInc piece too compelling, but CrimethInc's a platform. Fayer wrote it, so take the critique to Fayer.

Cept there's not much of a critique. They bring up pre-48 history, which everyone acknowledges (even if memory of the history is not what it should be - but that's a matter for, I dunno, education policy, not how to respond to current events), then they assert that the 1948 period was a "military defeat", protagonizing the invading Arab League states (run by bastards, for sure) and denying the existence, the humanity, or both, of ~700,000 people who were expelled, who were generally not a part of the invading Arab armies.

I don't know what exactly you're saying, but the history of Zionism and its results in the Middle-East is some complicated shit that generalizing about will always piss someone off. How do you even begin to critique any of it without writing a book on the topic?

I'm starting to wonder if it's worth the energy to get into so much of this history. Do I really want to learn about Zionism's various ideological positions? I started reading a volume of Ber Borochov's work, reading about Paole Zion and its splits, Moses Hess, Nachman Syrkin, the history of Mapam... these fucking people were all over the place in their thinking. Then trying to figure out who exactly was arguing for what when it came to the UN Partition Plan: Amin al-Husseini, the Palestine Arab Congress, The Istiqlal Party, different Arab Nationalist groups. If the Zionists were all over the place, the Arab Nationalists were especially all over the place. Even opposition to the Balfour Declaration wasn't total. At the end of the day, we know that almost none of it is compatible with anarchism.

All of this shit about "settler-colonialism" is just as over-simplified, especially pre-1948. If you start looking at the divisions of Ottoman administration before and after the Vilayet system/1867, how land became privatized before and after the British Mandate, who was selling what land to whom, why those people were selling it... it's hard to sum that all up as settler-colonialism. And why is it important to call it "settler-colonialism"? When I read about the shit the Ba'athists did, it seems like there is plenty of room in the logic of Nationalism (even Socialist nationalism) for ethnic cleansing. The impression I get is that the real point of calling it "settler-colonialism" is to focus on the (Zionist) Jews being foreigners. Which is itself more complicated history with Ashkenazi Jews coming and going as residents for hundreds of years.

And then there's the history of "Arabization" to begin with.

Anyway, there's so many fascinating things to learn going through all this, but what change does it make to my anarchist position? Like, fucking none. i'm no less anti-nationalist or anti-colonial than before. I'm also no less a Jew that understands the relationship between Jews and the Levant. I'm no less and no more sympathetic to Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel. Or in their diaspora!

All that whatever I said just said... that's why I liked this Fayer Collective piece. It didn't get bogged down in this history. It provides a current assessment of things. I'm not sure if it makes a clear case for why this should be a priority for anarchists right now, which would be a different topic anyway; but, it is pretty good. Especially compared to this other piece that just went up that promotes attacking "Zionists" - as if most people in the world aren't some kind of fucking nationalist. Like, I can't be the only one that notices that if most people are nationalists, it shouldn't be weird that most Jews are also nationalists. Sure, a lot of Americans believe in Civic Nationalism. A lot of the world doesn't. I tried to research which countries in the world have the weakest nationalist political parties... apparently Sweden, New Zealand, Uruguay... maybe? Not enough for the Jewish version to be extra special bad IMO. Should we just attack nationalists whenever one of the countries they're nationals of does something oppressive? I've never heard that proposed, but maybe that's the infamous Jewish sensitivity bubbling up.

I need to sleep. Fuck work.

CyberDandy, what all of this pro-Palestine nationalism bandwagon-jumping from the increasingly self-irrelevantizing anarchist pipsqueaks comes down to is: national self-determination (based on the delightfully vague, muddled, self-serving, and ultimately untenable ideology of indigeneity) is great for everyone -- except the Jews. The "settler-colonial" discourse is based on a hypermyopic understanding of static (that is, anti-nomadic) idea of land residency, which is 100% tied to the European discourse of citizenship/inclusion versus immigrant/exclusion. In the ideology and history of Europe (and clearly this position remains hegemonic among "third world" progressives as it does among reactionaries), Jews never belong; the Roman-imposed diaspora scattered Jews all over the known world, and attachment to Judaism made it impossible for the dominant religious rulers to accept them as full citizens or subjects. But that the Church had to issue periodic condemnations of social/business intercourse meant that plenty of everyday people didn't have too much trouble with Jews -- until it came time for the indulgent rulers to expropriate Jewish wealth: then the pogroms and expulsions became policy. The presence of Jews (as Jews, or better, "the Jews") still causes anxiety for nativists, nationalists, racists, and bigots all over the world, even when there are few if any resident/visible Jews. Antisemites all over the world thought that if the Jews could be convinced to accept their own form of nationalism, then they could be rid of their Jewish neighbors once and for all; but Jewish nationalism proved to be more attractive as an idea than as a project. Until the Holocaust. The guilty consciences of WWII's victors spurred on the further immigration of displaced/dispossessed European Jews to the Mandate Palestine and the acceptance of the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Those are the ones called "settler-colonists" -- those who, because of the callousness of the victors (who still didn't want Jews to come to *their* corners of the anticommunist Cold War empire); the old PLO Charter even allowed for pre-1948 Jewish residents to remain after Palestinian Liberation. By now, almost 80 years later, all Jewish citizens of the state of Israel are settler-colonists, and since Israel has universal conscription (for men and women, with the notable exception of all those ultra-religious cretins), all Jewish Israelis are either currently soldiers, soon-to-be soldiers, or reserve soldiers -- and therefore legitimate military targets. The "settler-colonialist" discourse implicitly allows for/mandates a Jewish genocide as surely as the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the current murderous fury of the Israeli war against Gaza mandates a Palestinian genocide; each side of this conflict believes--correctly--that the conflict is existential. There is no side for anarchists to take other than refusing the logic of "settler-colonialism" as anything other than an idiotic discourse, as well as the hypermilitarized cruelty and genocidal actions of the Israeli state. The nationalism of the subaltern is no less brutal and homicidal than that of the hegemon; it's only a difference in scale.

TL;DR version: to hell with nationalisms, to hell with Misrael and Paleswine. No state solutions.

True, and furthermore why is the Pro-Palestine crowd also not advocating for the mass murder and bombings of all non-Native American, Australian & Kiwi settlers.. the Arab settler populations of North Africa and Europe... all the Turkic settlers from Europe to East Asia... the Japanese setters... the German and Hungarian settlers ... and of course the Greco-Roman settlers that invaded most of Europe and the Middle-East back in the days? The list keeps going!

Aktchually... eradicating all of these settlers would rid us of a vast majority of the global human population.

Mass shooters, plagues and nuclear war now the new anarchist praxis! :-/

Still waiting for any voices in this or a conversation to explain how we revive the anarchist movement in the USA.

It isn't with a Chomsky level understanding of history. It isn't with non participation and it isn't joining non descript actions that leftists just end up recruiting from after they fail.

So, the way I look at it, this piece and everyone in this conversation has provided, zero. It's like the people who complain that the antiwar movement destroyed the anarchist movement in 2003. Take some responsibility for the anarchist movement or just admit that the PSL and octogenarian tankies have the ability to get you down. Fucking shit.

moooom! people aren't talking about what i want them to talk about! i keep telling them to, but they're ignoring me! mooooommmmm...

I don’t have an answer but I could think of a method for trying to answer that. Figure out first why people in the US take on any political ideology, then figure out if it’s possible for anarchism to even meet that standard. There’s a book that’s supposed to be basic political science reading called “ The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion” that would probably help with that first part.

Another method would be to figure out why anarchism’s popularity has come and gone over time in US history. What were the conditions and what were the anarchist responses to those conditions that made their positions or organizations more popular? The conditions themselves seem outside anarchist ability to impact. The responses from anarchists have to at least be intelligible to a lot of people and acceptable, if not outright appealing.

One thing that makes it hard for anarchism to be popular is that in a consumer society, people are used to supporting things by giving money to them somehow. Anarchists don’t create that option very often or they downplay its importance. This is a lesson we could all learn from the Zionists. They had organizations that accumulated enough money to do a lot of things, like buy land.

But that isn’t just about the accumulation of wealth. When people donate money to something they feel like participants and develop a sense of entitlement to the thing. They try to fight buyers remorse and justify their spending. They become attached and invested.

And also, lifestylism - for all its potential limits - also creates some of these same effects. People feel like participants by adopting lifestyles. They don’t even need to do common cultural things together, which is what makes lifestylism so powerful for corporations. Product ecosystems, branding, appeals to libido and lust for superiority, negation of inferiority feelings… that shit works. It also influences a lot of shallow boosting and the fandom. Which brings up the obvious question: do we want that? Because that’s the price of popularity today.

I don't disagree with any of this, but I don't necessarily think the price of culture is consumer societies failings. Maybe the answer is culture that puts anonymity and "faceless" leaders as an important concept. That actively combats anyone who wants to "profit" even socially from any communal activity. Then again, if this was the way to go, why hasn't it happened?

Generally though, the way you are talking is the right way to think about infrastructure. Creating bonds that are real in that there is a physical/social attachment. When most people talk infrastructure I really don't think they truly understand why it's important. Or rather they create infrastructure that centers the state itself and well, anarchism benefits net negative.

As for the time/place/moment my question is, if you got a group of friends together, pulled money together and started x/y/z anarchist cultural/social/directly political project would it be successful? The answer is almost assuredly. And this play out over and over. Why don't enough people see the value of this in the USA? Who knows, but it probably loops back to the lack of culture.

I don’t want to derail the shit out of this post with this conversation, but looking at how the cooperative and intentional community movements are in the USA, there is a lot of evidence that doing the thing and making the thing known are two different efforts. There are models for collective finance that get little attention. There are anarchists that collectively run things. But that doesn’t make anyone care …even other anarchists.

The other big issue is trust. If you look into the crypto ideologies, part of some of them is the goal of creating trustless systems. Anarchists concerned with privacy beyond cryptography also focus on trustless models. Trust is the currency of social life, so when anarchists seek models of minimal trust - sometimes for security culture reasons - there is a consequential obstacle to more publicly intimate approaches to doing things. This carries into even this site and its preservation of anonymity. There is potential for vetting and binding, but it’s not encouraged by the structure. From the outside (of anarchist spaces), that isn’t a very appealing social space to get into. And at the end of the day, anarchists are often alienating themselves from popular society anyway …including myself a lot of the time. I don’t like this society. That doesn’t inspire trust from others.

So unlike when anarchists could prove their value and trustworthiness in the labor movement, at the height of anarchist popularity, conditions now are unfavorable.

"Still waiting for any voices in this or a conversation to explain how we revive the anarchist movement in the USA."

You could not be at a more WRONG place for this.

"So, the way I look at it, this piece and everyone in this conversation has provided, zero."

Your entitlement is cringe AND laughable. This is like going to post bookfair moist orgy and getting SO MAD that nobody wants to teach you how to play Minecraft.

READ THE ROOM. And, perhaps "take some responsibility for" yourself and do your own research and learn to think for yourself and form your own opinions and not demand people spoon-feed you what to think, your dork.

This is a post from IGD. They are supposed to be the ultimate in strugglismo so this is the right place for it. Also to think that the IRL anarchists who aren't bed ridden curmudgeons who browse A News don't have shit to say about the direction of anarchy is potato level thinking. It was directly these types of anarchists who created/browse this site who reignited the anarchist movement almost 25 years ago *not* IGD.

Generally you are not getting what I am saying though. I agree with your last paragraph. This is my point. Do you seriously think nihilist/anticiv anarchists aren't showing up at PSL demos and then complaining immediately afterward without doing anything to change those conditions? I know you know this, so...come on. It's like you read that actually good Bash Back critique of people blaming organizers for everything but somehow don't understand the context.

Popping in here to say the best way to start a convo on Anews is to bother everyone so this is definitely the right way to do it lmao

I'll teach you how to play Minecraft. The first thing you need to know is Minecraft is a proprietary game and Minetest is the open source version which is better. Also the point of the article was that Palestinian Action was successful in shutting down Elbit systems and there's all kinds of actions going on right now around the world targeting the defense industry and it's support systems.

I enjoyed learning about the Fayer Collective and I even followed the finding our own fire link to the article at the anarchist library which is interesting. I was disappointed when I followed the link to their homepage to find that it is a private page on X. I can't even look at it because I deleted my account. Why not use the Mastodon account?

You should use the kolektiva.social instance there's a lot of like-minded people and fellow travelers on there.

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