selfactivity

If it seems somewhat ridiculous to talk of revolution, this is obviously because the organized revolutionary movement has long since disappeared from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive social transformation are concentrated. But all the alternatives are even more ridiculous, since they imply accepting the existing order in one way or another.

It’s irrelevant whether this specific group in Cleveland “should” have seen through the provocateur: when the FBI can’t find terrorists, they are obviously willing to manufacture them. Particularly in a capitalist society, there will always be alienated and isolated individuals susceptible to manipulation.

Anarchists have blissfully overlooked the past dozen major cases of FBI provocation, assuming the repression would be limited to already-marginalized immigrant communities. Unfortunately for us though, a state strategy that was first introduced against anarchists (the Eric McDavid case) has now come full-circle and there’s no reason to believe that just because we continue the ritual of distancing and denunciation, this strategy won’t be used time and again to demolish whatever little legitimacy we have within the working class.

Further, we should ask why the FBI has persisted in this strategy, given that it is so clumsy and transparent. Perhaps it is not purely about targeting marginal sectors, but is instead a small but central dimension of a wider push to keep the population tied to the state through the politics of fear. The currently emerging movements are still tentative and have an ambiguous relationship to the class struggle, but this latest affair demonstrates the state’s preemptive interest in immunizing society against spreading social conflict.

The solution is not to denounce the arrested or distance them from the anarchist movement- a hopeless (and spineless) project that will be ignored by the same capitalist media who are always eager to boost ratings by stoking fear of the ever-present anarchist/Islamist/far-right global conspiracies. Instead, we should work to loudly denounce and expose the state’s role in organizing these provocations and demonstrate the functionality of these schemes for the maintenance of class peace.

This proposal is contextual and clearly limited to countering this particular FBI strategy. It’s not an invitation for insulting comrades with whom we disagree as provocateurs. As much as I’m horrified by the turn of a wing of the insurrectional anarchist movement towards terrorism/armed struggle (CCF/FAI, especially), the nature of the Cleveland allegations obviously falls outside the character of even that wing of the movement. If we can’t distinguish between the two, we won’t be able to launch an appropriate political response to either, and will be limited to sectarianism.

This whole affair is a frontal attack on those anarchists organized within a movement, but it’s also more literally an attack on the isolated and inexperienced victims who were apparently drawn in by the provocateur, and solidarity with them is another prerequisite for all of us surviving this attack. When we try to isolate them, all it does is encourage the FBI to continue their policy of targeting the weakest members of the herd, laying the groundwork for the next “terror plot.”