Introduction
Make no mistake. Block Cop City was a defeat. Nobody gained entry to the site, in spite of what organizers said. Construction on the project, while halted for two days, continues today. The state used its power to ensure that the construction site would be safe.
But it wasn't a failure. It wasn't crushed. The resistance continues. We are closer to achieving our long term goals, in spite of that particular short term goal not being reached. Because of some good planning, organizing, and discipline, there were no injuries and only one arrest. We live to fight another day. The Jail support resources aren't overstretched. And most importantly, a better future was envisaged.
Whether it was the plan of the organizers or in spite of the organizers, a huge number of fresh-faced, new antifascists who came to Atlanta to participate in this action now have some experience and some tools available to them to take more radical action safely at home. The effects of this will spread across the country.
Those who answered the call and came left with experience and training in how to organize as affinity groups, come to group consensus, and imagine alternate structures of power and decision making. While the day's objective wasn't achieved, we can use the lessons from the weekend to build stronger resistance. The state has declared war on us. The more organized we are, the better we can fight back.
Participant Reflections
One Participant, an Atlanta resident, had this to say when asked about the Block Cop City weekend:
There were aspects of this recent action that were well thought out and executed and other things not so much. I feel like the spokes-council model was very useful in organizing smaller affinity groups into a larger movement and would like to see more of that general dynamic in future events.
Something that tends to happen in autonomous action is that there ends up being a 'vanguard' or inner circle at the core which can limit the scope of who is able to meaningfully contribute to the direction of an action because it creates a hierarchy. At spokescouncil it felt like this at times because it was primarily a small group of speakers who directed the entire block cop city movement. at times this lead to dismissal of certain concerns which were brought up by AGs.
During the action itself, the group of marchers stayed in a solid formation, having practiced the night before on how to not get broken up by linking arms and resisting police violence. Along with this, the organization of the whole crowd was as follows: blue group at the front leading the march, purple in the middle with puppets, and orange in the back with medics and if/when the march turned around they would lead. I feel like that was a good way to organize because it allowed people to know where to be and how to prepare for each segment of the formation.
One thing that was not good is how the front of blue was told their banners were reinforced, but when police in riot gear attacked the front, the banners immediately came off their frames and those without body protection were possibly injured, facing the brunt of force along with the formation behind them still moving. If people are to be involved nonviolently with actions such as block cop city, it is necessary to fully prepare them for state violence and how to protect themselves.
The Block Cop City Organizers claimed that action would be autonomous, and yet they made choices in advance about how the action would be organized. Some concerns were raised about those choices, but sometimes concerns were dismissed. By self-appointing themselves organizers, Block Cop City created a hierarchy in its organizing that may have led to some of the failures of the march itself.
A street medic who provided support to the march was critical of the way consensus was handled in the spokes-councils and how the event itself went:
A lesson for future actions of this nature and size should be to allow people time to rest in the process. I don't know everyone's reasoning, but the March that reached the line was about a third of the size of the March that left the park, and I spoke to a few folks who mentioned that they stopped marching and turned back less than halfway because they just didn't have an ounce of energy left to keep up. The days leading up to it ran a lot of folks ragged.
Things did not go as wrong as they very realistically could have, and I fear that that is going to lull people into a sense of security, and that they're going to let success(?) blind them from correcting mistakes.
There were giant gaps in the march as they made contact with the line, because when the message to slow down reached the front, someone brushed it off announcing "Don't listen to the medics, they are predisposed to panic"
In the blue spokes meeting, I was the only person who voted for a lower threshold than we settled on. Everybody else agreed on the threshold of [keep pushing forward until officers fire live rounds.] When the blue spokes joined the rest of the spokes, there were several people who spoke up in opposition to that agreement, but there were more people defending it and we ended up maintaining it by consensus. That is a decision that I don't believe was communicated to people who only showed up for the action, not for any of the spokes council stuff- people who may have showed up because they saw a poster the day before advertising the action.
That's why my AG kind of dissolved, and why I jumped in as a marked medic. There were quite a few of us who were bracing ourselves for the very real potential of a mass casualty incident. And I think that there were a lot of people in the crowd who might even now have no idea that a lot of us saw that potential.
There were also people in the very front who kept pushing in that riot line until they genuinely believed that officers had fired live rounds. If you watch the videos, an officer raises a shotgun and fakes kick back as a munition goes off and then lowers it. Super close after, two other officers come forward with long guns and one of them throws a stinger flash bang, which sends tiny rubber balls flying in all directions and sounds like a gunshot, and that is when the crowd truly scattered from the line.
Somebody distinctly claimed that they saw the shotgun go up and kept pushing until that point.
A driver and AG representative for the spokescouncils was also critical of the hierarchy the organizers created, but praised how well driving to and from the scene was handled:
There were certain roles during spokes that were more organized than others. For those who wanted to be drivers and shuttle protesters, there was a signal chat to do so without having to meet in person. The admin of this chat ran a tight ship.
They created an exhaustive list of directions and further divied up the AG into four groups called North, South, East and West. Drivers assigned to a certain region after dropping off protesters were put on standby within the area given and sent pickup requests by the admin. The admin would receive a text from a protester needing a ride, and depending on their location that request got transferred to the appropriate group chat for drivers to respond to. Everything went smoothly, despite people getting pulled over, no arrests were made and evac was never an issue during the day of action.
The only issue for me, however, was the illusion of "community agreements". During the spokes council they said the AGs would decide but after the second day they were the same as the opening speech given on the first day. I heard some people mumbling during breakout clusters who exactly agreed and set these 'agreements', but those voices weren't there when needed. An air of confusion permiated behind the scenes
The majority of those who spoke up during the day were in support of tactics limited to non-violence so that BIPOC wouldn't get arrested. I felt that due to these sentiments, people were afraid to speak up and have a repeat of what happened during the last week of action in March. So instead the speakers assumed consensus surrounding non-violence, and made no ammendments to the agreements leading up to the day of action.
Conclusion: Unanswered Questions But a Clear Path Ahead
If we're truly going to organize against the state non-hierarchally and autonomously, why was this event organized with a hierarchy? Certainly some structures could've been created to ensure that spokes-council discussions ran smoothly, but the way organizers were selective about what input was actually adopted and gave the illusion that it would be consensus-run left a bad taste in the mouth of many participants.
While this action taught many affinity groups how to make decisions autonomously, it was not itself autonomous. A small, core group of people made decisions for everyone and made the claim that it was the people autonomously making those decisions. In the future, we can have spokes-councils and affinity group-centered organizing without a shadow government of public organizers making decisions for us and overriding the consensus we come to.
Many of the concerns brushed aside were raised by BCC participants who had spent time in the past occupying the forest. Even on the day of the action, the planned route that had been agreed upon (marching down constitution road rather than the bike path) was discarded in favor of marching up the bike path, a narrow chokepoint that ended in a fortified tunnel full of Dekalb County Police officers. People were then funneled back onto the street, ending up on constitution road anyway. From start to finish, it seemed that the police controlled and chose the route that protestors took.
If we come to consensus on something, we should stick with that consensus rather than marching on the route that will give us the prettiest photographs. This was to be a direct action to block the construction of Cop City, but it was organized to be a photo opportunity for journalists. Why did the decision of a few organizers override the will of participants? Why were concerns brushed aside? What objectives did the organizers have that they didn't share with those who put their bodies on the line for them?
Perhaps those questions will remain unanswered. We can take lessons from block cop city and its organizing and carry them with us as the struggle continues. We can take the skills we acquired that weekend and pass them on to our comrades in our home cities. We can apply them in this movement and in the many other movements intertwined with it. We have the opportunity to define our future ourselves. Autonomy is becoming more and more popular with every day and every protest. So many movements are intertwined here and everywhere.
To borrow a phrase from the Marxists, the contradictions are sharpening. We are getting stronger and the state is getting scared. During the weekend of action, people imagined a better future together. A future in which everyone's voice was taken into consideration. A future where everyone had enough to eat because food was distributed based on need, not on greed. Not only did we imagine it, for a few days we lived it. We took care of each other and housed and fed each other and kept each other safe, in spite of the hardships and the repression we encountered. We have witnessed a better world and we cannot turn back to this one. The state will tear itself apart before it allows us to bring our vision to reality. It will ruin itself to ruin us, but we are not in the least afraid of ruins.
Submitted Anonymously Over Email
found on Scenes from the Atlanta Forest