Breaking Ranks

the human strike!

From Scenes from the Atlanta Forest
July 2, 2023

Original title: Breaking Ranks: Subverting the Hierarchy and Manipulation Behind Earth Uprisings

Print PDF: https://scenes.noblogs.org/files/2023/07/breakingranks_print.pdf
Read PDF: https://scenes.noblogs.org/files/2023/07/breakingranks_read.pdf

At this point, many anarchists in the US are already familiar with how tiqqunists destroyed the struggle at the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD (Zone to Defend) occupation in France in favor of legalization and property ownership [1]. The narrative that this tragic conclusion to the decade-long struggle was actually a victory has been regurgitated ad nauseum by tiqqunist platforms in the US. For example, Ill Will Edition’s “The Strategy of Composition” is about applying this “strategy” to the struggle against Cop City: “The territorial phase of the struggle took shape gradually over a ten year period from 2008 until its eventual victory in 2018, and has since continued to nourish collective experiments on the Zone to this day”.

The next initiative of the ex-ZAD tiqqunists failed when those familiar with their methods of recuperation and authoritarianism sabotaged their attempts to take the vanguard of a ZAD located in Carnet. Comrades from the Carnet ZAD along with those from several other struggles co-authored a statement outlining the attempts at cooptation and centralization, which we included as an appendix in this zine as an inspiring example of anti-authoritarians making a struggle inhospitable to authoritarian power plays.

After this failed attempt at bringing autonomous and decentralized struggles under their control, the tiqqunists of the ex-ZAD moved on to their most recent initiative: Soulevements de la Terre (which translates to “Earth Uprisings”, aka SDT). Exploiting the momentum of groups like Extinction Rebellion, and the broader youth climate movement, SDT offers activists a militant alternative to civil disobedience: mass demo-actions against ecologically destructive targets. While these have included some notable acts of sabotage, it is important to notice that their actions are often just as limited to symbolic engagement as those of the non-violent environmentalists, designed to promote the organization through sensationalism aimed at capturing the attention of the mass media. A recent mass action against a water basin on March 25th resulted in serious injuries, prompting anarchists to more broadly articulate warnings about this organization’s political foundations and motivations. The authors of these texts are careful to critique the centralized forces behind SDT and not the participants, clarifying that they are not telling anyone to stop attending SDT actions, but rather encouraging them to maintain a critical eye towards how the actions are organized and what they are being asked to do.

Predictably, the two primary tiqqunist platforms in the US have championed Soulevements de la Terre: Ill Will Editions republishes their propaganda, and Inhabit does the same while proclaiming that their actions are “an exhilarating example of all that has gone well in the movement up until this point and chart a path forward we hope others can imagine walking themselves”. [2] The following three critiques from anti-authoritarians in France are therefore also relevant to our context. These texts focus on manipulative and vanguardist practices, the spectacularization of the struggle, and the use of radicals as shock-troops. The goal of these texts, and our translation effort, is to increase familiarity with these deceptive practices and strategies, an essential first step towards sabotaging the influence and control of any similar attempts in our own neck of the woods.

1. See The Mohawked Salamanders Burn Down the Salamander’s School: Why We Attacked the ZAD

2. To Those Who Marched at Sainte-Soline (Ill Will Editions) and Sabotage: Beyond the mega-basin, the horizon (Inhabit).

There are 29 Comments

it's not clear from the post but this is a foreword to a zine that lambasts the tiqqunists with such measured analyses as an essay titled "MANIPULATORS & ASSASSINS"

you can read the the zine at https://scenes.noblogs.org/files/2023/07/breakingranks_read.pdf

some of the bitterness about ZAD misbehaviors is legit but the larger anti-tiqqunist thing is starting to sound to my ears like a witch hunt.... as not so long ago when every primmie or anticiv /green anarchist got accused of being ecofash.

my spidey-sense tingles any time i hear someone blaming anarchists for the violence of the state (as here, where the evil scheming manipulating tiqqun puppetmasters are responsible for the cops nearly killing serge & wounding many others at Sainte-Soline)

why does Anews allow such blatant bullshit which is clearly just idiocy aimed at sowing division? do you honestly think tbis is a good piece and not just some hate filled sectarian out for revenge? literally posts like this are the best reason to abandon traditional anarchism

anti-tiqqunism like this = left-wing anti-semitism (the hidden trait).
also the person who wrote this is a known sexual assaulter. their tone is a dead giveaway

Flamebait you are responding to, i would be really mad too.

Hint: flaming = flame-bait.

that link was not posted before on this thread. why you starting shit?

eh, didn't realize what you were complaining about. you're right. you didn't post a link that got removed, you posted comments that got removed. sloppy reading on my part.

thecollective member .4

the link shows the comment that you've repeatedly deleted...

also isn't "starting shit" basically the entire point of this comment section?

pathetic to release this as the french state targets some of the earth uprising people with terrorism charges and a dissolving of the entire organization

honestly this article is fucking pathetic –– tweeters like that one woman in the bay area who is objectively an awful poet (her poems only appeal to liberals who know nothing about anarchism and anarchists who know nothing about poetry) just post shit like this on twitter all day to spark division. what's the point? what does the anarchist movement in America have to show for itself? stupid little bookfairs? ignorant

wHAt'S the poInT? wHat DoES the AnaRCHiST moVeMeNt IN AMErIcA hAve tO SHOW FOR ItSelf? sTupID LItTle bOOKFAiRs? IgnOrAnT

anarchism in the US is just an identity: an identity for liberals

Including both you numbskulls.

"Congratulations, you played yourselves." --DJ Khaled

Great article. And yeah, tiqqunistas and their pathetic American counterparts in Inhabit and etc are ridiculously bad at even being lame af commies. And yup, backstabbers to the extreme.

Such a concentration of lies, confusion and idiocy is rare. Congratulations!

Where did these tiqqunist commenters come from?! I feel like I’m reading shallow Stalinist responses to Spanish revolution anarchists calling out the betrayals and backstabbings (obviously on a smaller scale). No real addressing of very specific accusations the pamphlet lays out, just bot-like responses of insults and “how dare you destroy our unity at this time.” Did this get posted in some tiqqunist thread and people were like, “we need an orchestrated effort to flood the comments.”

Lmao nice. Laughing so hard with this commenter because nobodycould have said it better!

lmao the spanish civil war comparison. Priceless!! it's like the anarcho-liberal discourse version of godwin's law... leftist red-and-blacks cryptostatists put the "U" in CNT, every time

as for those accusing the TIQQUNIST MENACE of infiltrating the comments, i am far from a tiqqunist. i am a very different and arguable more disreputable flavor of anarchist... but i am weirded out by american "anarchists" crying about tiqqunists. none of the fervent tiqqun qqomplainers i've heard from the states seemed to have any clue what they were talking about.

the puritan drive to witch-hunt is embedded deep in the u.s. protestant psyche and surfaces over and over in only slightly different forms.

you! i like you. you get it.

i don't even LIKE most leftists but you know what's almost always worse? the kind of foamy mouthed, internet-is-the-same-as-real-world, libertarian hobgoblins that don't even know 2/3rds of their rhetoric is indistinguishable from the fash. go outside. talk like a person instead of a fukin meme.

no, the commies are not "taking over anarchy" you fukin batshit losers. you're so far behind, you think you're first. anarchism has gradually drifted away from doctrinaire leftism over many years AND THAT'S A GOOD THING. just let it keep happening like it already is.

1.) The texts in the pamphlet above are from French anarchists, not “american anarchists crying about tiqqunists”
2.) The critique of the tiqqunists above is hardly from a puritan leftist perspective- if anything it is describing the appelista/tiqqunist little pacts with the left wing of the state that thwarted more experimental anarchist activity.

You flood of tiqqunist loyalist commenters are really delusional. Read what is being said in the article with an open mind, not a mind looking for a gospel to sweep you off your feet.

some of the texts in the pamphlet (the stuff about NDDL) were interesting reads.

however

some of the texts in the pamphlet (and all of the illustrations) were disingenuous handwringing about TIQQUN SCHEMERS craftily enticing poor helpless personal-agency-lacking naive cannon-fodder anarchists into the violent hell of frozen mud that was the MEGABASIN. absolutely embarrassing.

the existence of the zine in english and its publication on Scenes is part of a concerted effort by a few bitter individuals to badjacket "tiqqunism" in north america & has resulted in a bunch of americans who don't know shit breathlessly warning each other about its sectarian evils.

i hope that was helpful, now i'm off to a demo here where i live... and if i get bopped by the cops i'll be sure and make my own zine calling out the organizers for maliciously endangering me!

Flower Bomb and a bunch of French kids he used to 'study' with have already infiltrated the Atlanta Forest movement, I fear this article is a case of too little, too late.

...And still you continue trying to be funny. Desperately shouting into the void for attention with your weird obsession with FB.

So true about the obvious pro-tiqqun idiots from Inhabit and Woodbine (they read a-news religiously) trying to defend their backstabbing comrades in the name of unity. Of course they don’t like being called out for their nonsense which would get in the way of recruiting for their apocalyptic bs.

It’s interesting how the most non-western sounding word is picked out to identify the “sneaky” enemy who are - basically militant liberals from the sound of things? And who seem to draw much more influence from the works of the invisible committee (Appel and coming insurrection, which quite a lot of anarchists used to be into) than the lyrical and esoteric ramblings published in an obscure and short-lived philosophy zine over twenty years ago. I believe in France, that tendency are known as appelistes… meanwhile, “the tiqqunists” are frequently rumored to be undermining the cause in Atlanta, but it’s still not been made clear why. Everything described here, I think we would expect to be coming much more from the likes of XR who have already been well known and well criticized by @s. Sorry, you can’t just run around screaming “the tiqqun goons are coming!” and expect me to believe you. Better to ask why the vein of reaction so deeply underlies virtually all “ecological struggles”.

Go outside

have you been anywhere offline? for example it's obvious to people who have been to the atl forest defense who tiqqunists are.

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