submitted anonymously –
This is a light transcription of a talk on anti-repression given at the St’cas (so-called Olympia) Festival of Resistance. I wish I had come prepared to audio record this because there’s some stuff missing, but I hope this is useful and I will probably do this again.
Anti-Repression
The state has two strategies for dealing with potentially revolutionary movements, spaces, organizations and projects – Repression and Recuperation, the iron fist and the velvet glove.
I’m going to be talking about repression, but I want to touch on recuperation because it can be part of a broader repressive strategy.
Recuperation can broadly be thought of as institutional capture – giving individuals and organizations resources, recognition, a seat at the table under the guise of furthering their project but coming with limits, strings attached and incentives to abandon the movements they came from.
Two good examples:
A local example of this in action is the transformation of Just Housing into Olympia Mutual Aid Partners (OLYMAP). Just Housing was a group of homeless and housed people engaging in survival projects for camps and individuals as well as a lot of protests against the no sit/no lie ordinances, against sweeps, against the closing of what few public bathrooms there were during the evenings. Some of the core organizers got poached by the city, offered large salaries and they re-organized into a non-profit OLYMAP that contracts with the city and county mostly to help sweep camps.
The second being Incite! Women of Color Against Violence who have written the seminal critique of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex based on their experience of their foundation funding coming with strings attached that was pulled when they began organizing for Palestine, and instead of capitulating to institutional capture, they successfully managed to do their own fundraising to meet their needs.
That’s a really really brief overview with recuperation, it deserves to be gone into more deeply on its own.
So then what is Repression? I think when most people think of repression they think about like house raids and prison time, which is a large part of it no doubt, but it’s also surveillance, house visits, cops or federal agents pulling up to you and casually addressing you by name just to flex that they know you, it’s cops or agents contacting your family, your boss, your landlord and it’s the psychological effects of these.
So to be a little overly broad, I would say that repression is actions taken by our enemies – state or otherwise – that seek to destabilize and demobilize our movements.
Because that’s what they aim to do. We have to break this idea that this is like a game of cops and robbers, we broke the law and the state is trying to catch us and bring us to justice. What the state aims to do is identify and map potentially rebellious networks to then destabilize and neutralize movements using whatever means necessary.
We can look at what they do to make sense of it in this way – a door knock is for fishing for information, but it’s also a scare tactic. They know it freaks people out and that people’s imagination runs wild so in this way it’s not just for fishing for information but is in and of itself a punitive tactic meant to scare and destabilize people just for being part of revolutionary movements. Similar for, say, arresting someone on false or weak charges they know aren’t going to stick – it’s not about catching you for a crime but putting you through the criminal-legal system is in itself a punishment to scare people and tie up resources.
And this stuff doesn’t happen just to people who engage in particularly combative or illegal action – it can happen to anyone who is part of revolutionary movements, sometimes it’s an explicit pressure on people who they know don’t do that stuff to send a message of if you support these people or keep associating with these people we will ruin your life. Sometimes they’ll find particularly isolated and vulnerable people to groom into doing particular actions so they can present a terrorist to the world.
So that’s a basic overview of what repression is so now I want to talk about anti-repression practices and jumping off the last point I think the most important anti-repressive practice we can all as individuals do is to take ourselves and what we do seriously.
This doesn’t mean being like a joyless soldier, but it means really thinking hard about what you’re doing, what you believe in, and preparing yourself for the consequences. Are you prepared to have your house raided? Are you prepared to do time? Because revolutionary activity isn’t a hobby and it’s not a joke; police, prosecutors and judges don’t have senses of humor and they take what we do seriously. And the consequences are serious.
So take time to prepare yourself, read the words of comrades who have faced repression and have been to prison, write to prisoners, demystify prison to free yourself mentally to take the actions that need to be taken.
And prepare yourself for house raids – are your digital devices encrypted? Do you regularly delete things that need to be deleted? Do you burn organizing notes you take? Are all your sketchy items in places where it would make sense for them to be?
Prepare yourself for arrest too – do your comrades know your legal name? If something happens to you, are there comrades who will take care of your pets? Your children? Will someone contact your work? Are your medications in their original container with your name on it [admin note – if you are taken to jail and your friends need to bring you your medications, the jail will only accept the meds if they’re in their original prescription container with your name on it]? It’s preparing all of this stuff beforehand so you can rest easy doing whatever you need to do.
And understand that neither our lives nor the struggle ends when we are incarcerated, our conditions change, the terrain shifts, how we interact with the rest of the movement changes. It changes, but it doesn’t end.
These last two ones are ones people maybe don’t think about often, but we need to cut rumors and gossip. Our enemies are listening to these things to find ins and vulnerable points to push, but also it spreads bad information practices and misunderstandings and breeds an environment of distrust. If you have issues, deal with them directly with the people involved. If you hear rumors that you have not investigated and confirmed, don’t spread them. Clear communication saves a lot of headaches.
Lastly we need to give each other a little grace and be good to each other. There’s a social component to revolutionary struggle which is tearing down the ways we have all been socialized into reproducing fucked up power relations. We want to live up to this as best as we can, but we’re going to fuck up and when we do we need to be humble and honest, and when our friends and comrades and even people we don’t really like fuck up we need to give a little bit of grace and with love we need to hold ourselves and each other to the principles and standards we claim. This is what creates strong movements that are hard to tear apart because when we treat even those among us we like the least well, with a base line of dignity, solidarity and respect it creates important bonds of solidarity and trust to keep us strong when our enemies come knocking.
Beyond individual preparation we have to understand that anti-repression is a fight. They want to individualize acts of repression, isolate the person or people being repressed and justify their action as just dealing with criminal activity. Which is true in a sense, but also what crime isn’t also political?
But we have to maintain a solid principle of solidarity with people and movements facing repression. This means that whatever issues and disagreements I have with you or your organization – they don’t matter here. When repression comes we rally together and say if you fuck with one of us you better be prepared to fuck with all of us.
Part of this is organizing counter-information to get our narrative and analysis of the repression out, part of this is doing fundraisers as needed, public support rallies or solidarity actions, noise demos at jails and prisons were our comrades are being held, showing up en-mass to court dates, supporting individuals facing repression with basic tasks of living like giving rides, cooking them food, being there to talk through things or just hang out and keep their minds off it if that’s whats needed.
In a more broad way this also means continuing to support our comrades who are doing longer stints. Organizing letter writing nights, keeping them involved in the struggle by publishing their writing, reading it together, asking them to give statements to be read aloud at events, keeping our comrades inside as an active part of the movement, not an afterthought.
When we have a strong culture of supporting our comrades in the short and long term, it creates an environment where it’s easier to weather repression and individuals feel more empowered to do what needs to be done.
The last and most important thing is we have to continue our struggle no matter what. It can be really easy when facing repression to shift all our time and energy into supporting comrades and suddenly the struggle gets sidelined. In that way repression still succeeds. We need to develop the capacity to support our comrades in situations of acute repression AND still fully engage in the struggle for total freedom.
Quickly, I want to mention some really bad anti-repression practices I’ve seen.
The first is assuming that simply by facing repression that what you’re doing is effective. We should never judge our activities effectiveness by the reaction of our enemies – we need to have our own criteria that we can observe and analyze. Also because since the Vietnam war and especially in the post 9/11 world the doctrine of anti-repression has been based around counter-insurgency which seeks to identify and destabilize potential threats before they are a threat.
Secondly, when facing repression like door knocks people mistakenly don’t tell anyone. The police already know they visited you, they know what they tried to talk to you about, your silence only helps the enemy. Yes our enemies our scary but the moment you face repressive activities you need to let your wider community know as soon as possible.
Another one is the classic “oh well I’m not doing arson or anything like that so I don’t have anything to hide.” Of course you have something to hide, we all do. We don’t ever want to give our enemies information, or assume they already have certain information so it’s okay to be lax in a certain aspect. We’re not isolated individuals but connected to everyone around us and broadly engaged in the struggle for liberation and – if comrades are taking operational security seriously – you don’t know what the people around you are getting up to.
Here are some useful resources.
Puget Sound Prisoner Support – [email protected]
If you’re contacted by federal agents: Federal Defense Hotline – (212) 679-2811
If you’re contacted by ICE: WAISN Deportation Defense Hotline – 1-844-724-3737
submitted anonymously –
This is a light transcription of a talk on anti-repression given at the St’cas (so-called Olympia) Festival of Resistance. I wish I had come prepared to audio record this because there’s some stuff missing, but I hope this is useful and I will probably do this again.
Anti-Repression
The state has two strategies for dealing with potentially revolutionary movements, spaces, organizations and projects – Repression and Recuperation, the iron fist and the velvet glove.
I’m going to be talking about repression, but I want to touch on recuperation because it can be part of a broader repressive strategy.
Recuperation can broadly be thought of as institutional capture – giving individuals and organizations resources, recognition, a seat at the table under the guise of furthering their project but coming with limits, strings attached and incentives to abandon the movements they came from.
Two good examples:
A local example of this in action is the transformation of Just Housing into Olympia Mutual Aid Partners (OLYMAP). Just Housing was a group of homeless and housed people engaging in survival projects for camps and individuals as well as a lot of protests against the no sit/no lie ordinances, against sweeps, against the closing of what few public bathrooms there were during the evenings. Some of the core organizers got poached by the city, offered large salaries and they re-organized into a non-profit OLYMAP that contracts with the city and county mostly to help sweep camps.
The second being Incite! Women of Color Against Violence who have written the seminal critique of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex based on their experience of their foundation funding coming with strings attached that was pulled when they began organizing for Palestine, and instead of capitulating to institutional capture, they successfully managed to do their own fundraising to meet their needs.
That’s a really really brief overview with recuperation, it deserves to be gone into more deeply on its own.
So then what is Repression? I think when most people think of repression they think about like house raids and prison time, which is a large part of it no doubt, but it’s also surveillance, house visits, cops or federal agents pulling up to you and casually addressing you by name just to flex that they know you, it’s cops or agents contacting your family, your boss, your landlord and it’s the psychological effects of these.
So to be a little overly broad, I would say that repression is actions taken by our enemies – state or otherwise – that seek to destabilize and demobilize our movements.
Because that’s what they aim to do. We have to break this idea that this is like a game of cops and robbers, we broke the law and the state is trying to catch us and bring us to justice. What the state aims to do is identify and map potentially rebellious networks to then destabilize and neutralize movements using whatever means necessary.
We can look at what they do to make sense of it in this way – a door knock is for fishing for information, but it’s also a scare tactic. They know it freaks people out and that people’s imagination runs wild so in this way it’s not just for fishing for information but is in and of itself a punitive tactic meant to scare and destabilize people just for being part of revolutionary movements. Similar for, say, arresting someone on false or weak charges they know aren’t going to stick – it’s not about catching you for a crime but putting you through the criminal-legal system is in itself a punishment to scare people and tie up resources.
And this stuff doesn’t happen just to people who engage in particularly combative or illegal action – it can happen to anyone who is part of revolutionary movements, sometimes it’s an explicit pressure on people who they know don’t do that stuff to send a message of if you support these people or keep associating with these people we will ruin your life. Sometimes they’ll find particularly isolated and vulnerable people to groom into doing particular actions so they can present a terrorist to the world.
So that’s a basic overview of what repression is so now I want to talk about anti-repression practices and jumping off the last point I think the most important anti-repressive practice we can all as individuals do is to take ourselves and what we do seriously.
This doesn’t mean being like a joyless soldier, but it means really thinking hard about what you’re doing, what you believe in, and preparing yourself for the consequences. Are you prepared to have your house raided? Are you prepared to do time? Because revolutionary activity isn’t a hobby and it’s not a joke; police, prosecutors and judges don’t have senses of humor and they take what we do seriously. And the consequences are serious.
So take time to prepare yourself, read the words of comrades who have faced repression and have been to prison, write to prisoners, demystify prison to free yourself mentally to take the actions that need to be taken.
And prepare yourself for house raids – are your digital devices encrypted? Do you regularly delete things that need to be deleted? Do you burn organizing notes you take? Are all your sketchy items in places where it would make sense for them to be?
Prepare yourself for arrest too – do your comrades know your legal name? If something happens to you, are there comrades who will take care of your pets? Your children? Will someone contact your work? Are your medications in their original container with your name on it [admin note – if you are taken to jail and your friends need to bring you your medications, the jail will only accept the meds if they’re in their original prescription container with your name on it]? It’s preparing all of this stuff beforehand so you can rest easy doing whatever you need to do.
And understand that neither our lives nor the struggle ends when we are incarcerated, our conditions change, the terrain shifts, how we interact with the rest of the movement changes. It changes, but it doesn’t end.
These last two ones are ones people maybe don’t think about often, but we need to cut rumors and gossip. Our enemies are listening to these things to find ins and vulnerable points to push, but also it spreads bad information practices and misunderstandings and breeds an environment of distrust. If you have issues, deal with them directly with the people involved. If you hear rumors that you have not investigated and confirmed, don’t spread them. Clear communication saves a lot of headaches.
Lastly we need to give each other a little grace and be good to each other. There’s a social component to revolutionary struggle which is tearing down the ways we have all been socialized into reproducing fucked up power relations. We want to live up to this as best as we can, but we’re going to fuck up and when we do we need to be humble and honest, and when our friends and comrades and even people we don’t really like fuck up we need to give a little bit of grace and with love we need to hold ourselves and each other to the principles and standards we claim. This is what creates strong movements that are hard to tear apart because when we treat even those among us we like the least well, with a base line of dignity, solidarity and respect it creates important bonds of solidarity and trust to keep us strong when our enemies come knocking.
Beyond individual preparation we have to understand that anti-repression is a fight. They want to individualize acts of repression, isolate the person or people being repressed and justify their action as just dealing with criminal activity. Which is true in a sense, but also what crime isn’t also political?
But we have to maintain a solid principle of solidarity with people and movements facing repression. This means that whatever issues and disagreements I have with you or your organization – they don’t matter here. When repression comes we rally together and say if you fuck with one of us you better be prepared to fuck with all of us.
Part of this is organizing counter-information to get our narrative and analysis of the repression out, part of this is doing fundraisers as needed, public support rallies or solidarity actions, noise demos at jails and prisons were our comrades are being held, showing up en-mass to court dates, supporting individuals facing repression with basic tasks of living like giving rides, cooking them food, being there to talk through things or just hang out and keep their minds off it if that’s whats needed.
In a more broad way this also means continuing to support our comrades who are doing longer stints. Organizing letter writing nights, keeping them involved in the struggle by publishing their writing, reading it together, asking them to give statements to be read aloud at events, keeping our comrades inside as an active part of the movement, not an afterthought.
When we have a strong culture of supporting our comrades in the short and long term, it creates an environment where it’s easier to weather repression and individuals feel more empowered to do what needs to be done.
The last and most important thing is we have to continue our struggle no matter what. It can be really easy when facing repression to shift all our time and energy into supporting comrades and suddenly the struggle gets sidelined. In that way repression still succeeds. We need to develop the capacity to support our comrades in situations of acute repression AND still fully engage in the struggle for total freedom.
Quickly, I want to mention some really bad anti-repression practices I’ve seen.
The first is assuming that simply by facing repression that what you’re doing is effective. We should never judge our activities effectiveness by the reaction of our enemies – we need to have our own criteria that we can observe and analyze. Also because since the Vietnam war and especially in the post 9/11 world the doctrine of anti-repression has been based around counter-insurgency which seeks to identify and destabilize potential threats before they are a threat.
Secondly, when facing repression like door knocks people mistakenly don’t tell anyone. The police already know they visited you, they know what they tried to talk to you about, your silence only helps the enemy. Yes our enemies our scary but the moment you face repressive activities you need to let your wider community know as soon as possible.
Another one is the classic “oh well I’m not doing arson or anything like that so I don’t have anything to hide.” Of course you have something to hide, we all do. We don’t ever want to give our enemies information, or assume they already have certain information so it’s okay to be lax in a certain aspect. We’re not isolated individuals but connected to everyone around us and broadly engaged in the struggle for liberation and – if comrades are taking operational security seriously – you don’t know what the people around you are getting up to.
Here are some useful resources.
Puget Sound Prisoner Support – [email protected]
If you’re contacted by federal agents: Federal Defense Hotline – (212) 679-2811
If you’re contacted by ICE: WAISN Deportation Defense Hotline – 1-844-724-3737