Sargon of ACAB

Sure, but that doesn’t change my points in any way.

I don’t live in the US so my assessment might be completely off here, but with protests like this you shouldn’t hope for the more radical positions. If you’re more radical yourself this can be annoying or feel like it serves no purpose and I get that. It still provides opportunities for us.

There’s two main reasons I advocate for showing up at things like this:

1. Treat it like a networking event. Go talk to people, hand out flyers, wave your flags, bring funny signs, hand out vegan cookies… As an anarchist I’m very much aware that most people never think about anarchists, and when they it’s rarely in a positive way. Protests like are an opportunity to get people to see, however briefly, that anarchists can be nice people with free cookies.

2. If or when things go poorly, like if the police or the far-right decides to escalate, I’d want people with experience there to provide assistance. Whether that’s taking up the front to defend others, yelling: “Walk! Don’t run!” while people are trying to get out of tear gas, handing out water so people can rinse out pepper spray (and telling people not to use milk), explaining how to handle a kettle, etc.

Installing something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu is fairly easy. The hardest part is probably creating the install media and that’s not particularly hard ei her.

If you don’t rely on specific software (like Adobe), using Linux is a good idea. I’d still advice not to mess with a computer you rely on and wait until you have sufficient time to troubleshoot something. Even if nothing goes wrong a new OS can still take a little getting used to.

It doesn’t respond to what’s going on around me, but bone-conduction headphones do help me stay focused and can be used when interacting with others if you don’t make the music too loud.

Even just very small and temporary ones would do a lot, in my opinion.

Part of what makes direct action valuable is that it temporarily creates a space for just doing what needs doing, with less regard to the reality of capitalism and the state.

It’s probably dangerous to think this is just any one thing. For the vast majority of people it’s likely just a form of normalization. If you’ve been involved with anarchism (or other radical politics) for a while it can be hard to remember just how normalized state repression or even state violence is. Similar to “capitalist realism” people just aren’t used to imagining that things could be differently. Addressing that would involve both arguing that certain things (such as police defaulting to violence) shouldn’t be considered as normal, while also presenting viable alternatives that we could be doing right now. For that last part I think the concept of prefigurative politics plays a big role.

I’d perhaps cautiously suggest that some sort of “learned helplessness” or a variation thereof could also be at play. When you lack agency and bad outcomes seem to happen regardless of what you do, many people will just passively accept the bad outcomes. Here I think people should be shown that through community and agency you can create positive outcomes. Getting people even tangentially involved in any form of direct action has been (in my experience) a good way to make that happen. It is, however, rather challenging to get people to take that step. Telling them about (successful) forms of direct action will be necessary here. Someone I know recently had the realization that direct action can have a much bigger impact than they thought after watching the documentary “To Kill A War Machine.”

Most people also just don’t have the necessary handholds to think about all of this. The necessity of a government or the continued existence of capitalism is taken as a given, the same as gravity or magnetism. A lot of effort gets put into making sure this is the case and most people don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to look into it much deeper.