Where the Sidewalk Cracks, Part 1: Ricochet Resistance
And lend your voices only
To sounds of freedom
No longer lend your strength
To that which you wish to be free from
— Jewel, “Life Uncommon”
WILL THE REAL RESISTANCE PLEASE STAND UP
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Black Lives Matter protests were organized in practically every town in the highly-segregated northwest corner of Indiana, where I live, near Chicago. In the midst of it, I was contacted by one event organizer, who asked me to attend his protest as a legal observer.
I’ve been serving as a legal observer for local protests for several years now. The role of a legal observer is not to participate in the protest, but to stay on the edges and watch the police, as well as any counter-demonstrators, and document any infringements on the rights of the protesters. Theoretically, I am there to serve as a witness in the event of police abuse. Practically, I serve more as a deterrent—I wear a bright green traffic vest and cap which say “Legal Observer” and “National Lawyer’s Guild”.
This protest was organized by a local group of anarcho-communists. I didn’t know the group, but always try to attend protests when invited to, because I am pretty much the only legal observer in a county of a half million people. In all, there were about a half dozen people. Later, they would be joined by a few more who had seen the event advertised on social media. With the exception of one young woman of color, the group was entirely White.
The protest was staged in a small, White, working class town that I’m very familiar with, because I attend the Unitarian Universalist church there. The group marched through the city park and into the downtown area, and then lined up along the street with their signs and started chanting. Periodically, one of the passing cars would honk in a friendly way. Other drivers flipped the group off or yelled profanities out their windows. The supporters and detractors (at least the vocal ones) were about evenly numbered.
The police were present, but inconspicuous for once. They stayed at a distance and around corners. But the really interesting part, for me at least, was not the protesters or the police. It was a couple of guys, locals, who were hanging around the protest. Superficially, they appeared to hit a lot of the “redneck” boxes. I don’t know his name, but I’m going to call one of them “Joe”.
At first, Joe just watched the protest, about two blocks away. I watched him and his friend watching the protesters. I watched him screw up his courage and eventually walk up to the protesters. The organizers met him and an argument ensued. The back-and-forth was typical “All Lives Matter” fare.
To his credit, Joe was civil, albeit openly antagonistic. Most of the protesters gathered in a small crowd around Joe. Only a couple of people stayed on the corner holding signs and trying to engage drivers. After a few minutes, I walked up to the organizer and pointed out that he was letting this one guy subvert what they came there to do. He agreed, and the group returned to their signs and chants.
Joe walked away, but he continued to lurk around the edge of the protest. I had to hand it to him. Joe had remained civil. He had not backed down when surrounded by a half dozen angry BLM protesters. With very little effort, he had managed to distract the organizers of the event from their purpose. He had also created a situation which could have gone very badly for the protesters. I could imagine the headline in the local paper: “Black Lives Matter Protesters Assault Peaceful Pedestrian”.
But Joe wasn’t done. From somewhere—maybe one of them ran home—Joe and his friend came up with some improvised cardboard “All Lives Matter” signs. They took to the next block over (adjacent to, not across from the BLM group) and started engaging the drivers-by in a parallel fashion. Then, Joe and his friend rounded up some preteen local kids who, up to that point, had been riding around the downtown aimlessly on their bikes. Joe recruited them as fledgling counter-protesters.
Now the counter-protest was almost the same size as the BLM protest. They got as much encouragement from drivers as the BLM protesters did. And they seemed to be having a blast with their ad hoc chants. The counter-protesters kept it up, until the organizers of the BLM protest wrapped it up for the evening.
Frankly, I was impressed. I would guess that I would probably disagree with Joe on just about any political issue. But his on-the-spot organizing abilities were impressive. More importantly, I was amazed how a BLM protest could end up creating the conditions for a counter-protest and possibly even politicizing a group of people who may have never engaged in a political demonstration otherwise.
Something’s Happening Here …
Now, lest you think I’m taking cheap shots from the peanut gallery, let me tell you about how the same thing happened at an event I myself organized, but on a larger scale, just a few weeks earlier.
It started with an outraged friend letting me know about a local Blue Lives Matter event on Facebook titled “Police Appreciation Day”. It was going to be a short parade, followed by a rally, and then food and entertainment at a banquet hall. The organizers had done this event every fall for a few years (one of them was the brother of a former police chief). But this year, they moved the event up to the summer—no doubt, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests going on locally and nationally.
Well, this cannot go unanswered, I thought. So I created a parallel counter-event on Facebook to occur on the same day and in the same town. I appropriated and altered the graphics used by the Blue Lives organizers, calling it a “Police Violence Awareness Day.” I then contacted the local Black Lives Matter groups, and we organized a counter-demonstration. With their help, I organized a symbolic funeral procession, with a donated hearse, followed by a rally at the local police station, near the Blue Lives event.
On the day of the event, there were almost 100 vehicles involved. We taped signs to the windows with the names and ages of BIPOC victims of police violence. And we circled around the Blue Lives event until it was time to rally. We had several speakers, mostly people of color. It was very moving. It felt good to stand up to a transparently reactionary critique of the Movement for Black Lives. The local paper reported on it. And from the perspective of most of the participants, the Black Lives Matter demonstration was a success.
The demonstration took place in the predominately White, more rural, southwest corner of the county, which is actively avoided by many people of color, who live mostly in the northern, more urban, industrialized, and blighted part of the county. Many of the people of color who attended the demonstration were legitimately concerned about their safety, because of its location, the presence of the police, and the large number of White people gathered in support of the police. So just attending the event was a kind of triumph for them. That’s not something that should be dismissed.
But all along the way, in spite of being the principal organizer, I had misgivings. From the start, I noticed an unusual level of interest in the Black Lives Matter event from Blue Lives people. Almost as soon as I posted the event on Facebook, I had people from all around the country sending me antagonistic messages. As we approached the day of the two events, I monitored the Facebook discussion on the Blue Lives event page. It was clear that the Black Lives counter-demonstration was generating a lot of support for the Blue Lives event. I don’t know what the turnout in the past years had been, but I am confident that our Black Lives Matter counter-demonstration drew more people out to the Blue Lives event. In the end, the number of people who gathered in support of the police was several times that of the BLM event.
While everyone was congratulating me on a great event, I was privately wondering what success means in these circumstances. I am convinced now that the most significant impact we had was to energize and mobilize people on the opposite side who might otherwise have stayed home. That was the last demonstration I organized. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened.
RICOCHET RESISTANCE
“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”
— Étienne de La Boétie
Vera Bradova, who writes as “Leavergirl” on her blog Leaving Babylon and at Resilience.org, explores the problems with popular forms of resistance and her journey to find an alternative. Among those problems, she lists:
There is a tendency for resisters to step into the shoes of the oppressors and become the new oppressors, especially if the revolution was forcible. Bradova calls this the “Logic of Power”.[FN 1]
Resistance is often co-opted and commodified, especially in capitalist systems.
Resistance “provides an anvil for the hammer of power”. In other words, the resisters make themselves targets.
Resistance helps the oppressor system evolve and become more adept at oppression.
Resistance gives energy to the oppressors, which is then turned against the resistance.
Much could be (and has been) written about each of these issues. But it’s the last one I want to focus on here—how resistance gives energy to the oppressors—because it helps explain what I witnessed in the two stories above. Bradova explains how resistance can provide motivating energy to the opposition. “Resistance provokes counter-resistance, and the more successful resistance is, the more it alarms and energizes the opposition. Hence the saying, ‘what you resist, persists.’” ( “Vive la résistance? Au contraire”).
Of course, that’s not to say that resistance creates oppression. The civil rights movement may have energized White supremacists, but it didn’t create White supremacy. The climate movement energized deniers, but it didn’t create the carbon economy. And I may have helped energize some Blue Lives sympathizers to attend the police appreciation event, but I didn’t create the police state.
Nevertheless, it seems true that “in your face” resistance tends to ricochet. Self-described “recovering environmentalist” Paul Kingsnorth[FN 2] calls this “the self-defeating identity politics of protest.” There are times, of course, when we must stand up to power, when we have no choice but to defend ourselves, our communities, and the more-than-human world. But when we do have a choice, when we are considering possible strategies, maybe flocking to the barricades isn’t always the best option.
Standard forms of resistance tend to put the focus on the oppressors and what we don’t want, instead of on what we do want. Instead of challenging the dominator culture head-on, Bradova says we should starve it by depriving it of our energy: “Deny it its coveted fuel: your effort, your attention and interest, your money, your loyalty, your goodwill and your good ideas. Deny it your streams of energy, one by one. Direct them instead to the Lifeworld.” (“Pulling the Plug”)
“The job of guerrilla dissenters is not to resist the Leviathan, but to stop feeding it. Our job is not to resist the PTB [Powers-That-Be], but rather to grow another kind of power and another way of life. Because both will be vigorously undermined if done visibly and loudly, guerrilla tactics are called for.”
— Vera Bradova, “Guerrilla Dissent”
Bradova gives an example from her home country of Czechoslovakia, following the 1968 Soviet invasion. In contrast to the Poles who actively opposed the invasion of their country, the Czechs and Slovaks withdrew from public life. Initially, Bradova was disappointed, but she writes:
“Now I see it as the sanest response they could have mounted. They withdrew from the system. They laughed at it in a million clever jokes. They worked as little as possible, they taught their own kids to look under the surface and see the lies, they believed nothing official but found their own sources of news, they created connected networks of craftspeople and others with useful skills to trade and get things done privately. And they put most of their energy into living. The system weakened; how could it not? … It is a lot easier to harass a few dissidents than to go after millions of people who are most notable by … doing as little for the system as they can get away with, just minding their everyday lives, and not believing anything you say.”
— Vera Bradova, “Pulling the Plug”
But having withdrawn our energy from the system, to where should we direct it? As John Holloway writes, “The real force of the serve no more comes when we do something else instead.” That something else, will be the subject of Part 2.
To be continued in Part 2: Interstitial Insurrection
Notes
1. Bradova writes: “We cannot create a non-domination society—i.e. an autonomous and cooperative partnership society—by employing domination strategies wielded by groups that know nothing but domination and will perpetuate it if they succeed in reaching the seats of power.” This is a version of Audre Lorde’s observation that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Or as the anonymous author of the 1999 “Give Up Activism” article wrote: “You cannot fight alienation by alienated means.”
Bradova draws on the writing of John Holloway, post-Marxist author of Change the World Without Taking Power (2002), who theorizes that revolution comes, not in the seizure of state power, but in everyday acts of refusal of capitalist culture (which he calls “anti-power”). Holloway explains that we cannot build a society of power-with by seizing power-over. “Once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost.”
“The idea of changing society through the conquest of power thus ends up achieving the opposite of what it sets out to achieve. Instead of the conquest of power being a step towards the abolition of power relations, the attempt to conquer power involves the extension of the field of power relations into the struggle against power. What starts as a scream of protest against power, against the dehumanisation of people, against the treatment of humans as means rather than ends, becomes converted into its opposite, into the assumption of the logic, habits and discourse of power into the very heart of the struggle against power. For what is at issue in the revolutionary transformation of the world is not whose power but the very existence of power. What is at issue is not who exercises power, but how to create a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity, on the formation of social relations which are not power relations.”
— John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)
2. Update: Over a period of a few years, Paul Kingsnorth’s political orientation has shifted from Green anarchism to proto-fascism. While it is impossible to draw a bright line marking when this occurred, I do not endorse Kingsnorth’s writing after the spring of 2020. COVID and his conversion to orthodox Christianity appear to have accelerated his slide to the right. See here for more on this. (Jan. 1, 2023)
JOHN HALSTEAD
John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, PrayWithYourFeet.org, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.