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Breaking with Consensus Reality:

From the Politics of Consent to the Seduction of Revolution

We who fight to create a freer world face a fundamental contradiction. On one hand, we don’t want to become a vanguard, “leading” or imposing our will on others, as that would run counter to our anti-authoritarian values. On the other hand, we believe with good justification that our political goals—including the destruction of capitalism, the state, and hierarchy—can’t be accomplished without strategies that are currently unpalatable to most of our fellow citizens. The impoverishment of millions and the destruction of our ecosystems demand that we act decisively. What criteria will equip us to challenge these systems without resorting to the authoritarian means we condemn?

Some of us have developed a practice of prioritizing consent as a provisional answer to this dilemma. This discourse comes to us through educators who promote it as a tool for fostering mutually respectful sexuality in the midst of a rape culture. Applying this model in our intimate relationships and beyond, we seek to respect others’ autonomy by not subjecting them to actions that violate their consent—that is, by staying within the boundaries of others’ desires as they determine and articulate them. We reject coercion of any form, whether physical, verbal, economic, or otherwise, and assert our self-determination to participate in or abstain from whatever we choose.

Yet outside of the sexual realm, consent discourse doesn’t always offer a sufficient framework with which to evaluate direct action tactics and strategy. Knowing whether an action is consensual may not suffice to indicate whether it is effective or worthwhile. Aware that most people oppose some of our tactics, we don’t plan our actions on the basis of consent, yet we don’t aspire to become a vanguard, either. Furthermore, since we can only desire on the basis of what we know, we’re unlikely to achieve liberation from simply fulfilling the desires we have now without changing the conditions that produced them. So how else might we conceive of our political project, if not through the lens of consent?

A close examination of our activities reveals that in setting out to foment insurrection and transform society, we appear to be operating according to a logic of seduction. Are we prepared to accept the implications of this reframing? Let’s begin by examining the politics of consent and their limitations.

Is Consent Enough?

At first glance, the notion of basing our political practice on a theory of consent makes intuitive sense. What’s our critique of the state? It’s a body that wields power over us even to the point of life and death, and yet no one ever asked us if we wanted to be governed. Elections don’t even begin to offer us the meaningful alternatives true consent would require. It’s been said before: our desires will never fit in their ballot boxes. We promote the principle of voluntary association—the freedom to form whatever groups and collectives we want without being compelled to participate in any. We never had the chance to say no to capitalism, to government, to police, to all the systems of hierarchy that impose their rule—so clearly those can’t be consensual in any meaningful way. As we do away with the coercive systems that dominate our lives, we can reconstruct new social relations based on consent: a world in which no one controls anyone else, in which we can determine our own destinies.

It makes sense . . . doesn’t it? Certainly, this discourse of consent offers a compelling way to imagine the world we want to live in. But how does it serve as a strategy for dislodging this one? It’s difficult to envision a political practice that stringently respects the consent of all people while simultaneously destroying the fabric of our hierarchical society. If we insist on the unity of means and ends, we have to dismantle coercive institutions and social relationships through non-coercive processes to build a non-coercive society. Abandoning this vision could undermine the very basis of our anarchism. Yet if we don’t succeed in dislodging capitalism and the state, the bases of economic and political coercion, we’ll never arrive at a society in which a consent-based framework could actually be tenable.

How can we resolve these dilemmas? Let’s look more closely at what we mean by consent, and how it operates in our society and in our movements.

Consensus Reality, Nonviolence, Liberal Consent

Power and consent are critically intertwined. Power imbalances make it difficult or impossible to give consent freely. Can a much older person have consensual sex with a very young person? Can someone who is subjected to another’s economic control freely consent to that person’s desires? For consent to be meaningful, it must be possible to say no, any time and for any reason, on one’s own terms. When the state monopolizes the use of force and the economy controls access to our very means of survival, we cannot meaningfully choose. We call the boundaries enclosing our ability to consent under these conditions consensus reality.

Consensus reality is the range of possible thought and action within a system of power relations. It is enforced not only through traditional institutions of control—such as mass media, religion, and the family—but also through the innumerable subtle norms manifested in common sense, civil discourse, and day-to-day life. It isn’t simply the aggregate of all our desires, melded together in a great compromise that allows us all to get along, as democratic mythology would have it. Consensus reality constitutes the ruling class’s coordinated attempt to uphold their dominance and our exploitation as efficiently as possible. Capitalist democracy secures that efficiency; it is the system that currently provides the largest number of people with incentive to participate in their own exploitation. It offers us a series of meaningless options to disguise a profound lack of agency over our lives. The trump card of capitalist democracy is the idea that everyone’s consent is respected in a marketplace of ideas within which desires can be freely expressed and influenced.

We can argue that this marketplace isn’t truly free—corporations control the mass media, some views get more airtime than others, thus the consent is not fully informed—but this doesn’t get at the heart of things. Obviously, equal access to means of influence on a level playing field is impossible in capitalist society. But it is the systems of power, not just speech, that determine the framework within which we experience reality. All political systems—whether anarchist, fascist, or democratic—produce particular patterns of social relations. Mere discussion of these systems does not; it cannot transcend the framework in which it occurs.[1] Free speech discourse offers each of us our own box of colored chalk to decorate the cement blocks around our feet, and calls that freedom; whether we can walk away doesn’t even enter into the picture. Our experience of what we are and aren’t able to do determines our sense of what is possible far more than our ideas and discourses. To shift the boundaries of our imagination and desires, we have to find ways to make new experiences possible beyond the bounds of consensus reality.

Take, for example, the debates about violence and nonviolence that rage in every organizing coalition and Occupy movement. What is violence? At first glance, the term seems to have no more coherence than the Supreme Court definition of obscenity: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. This makes it an especially dangerous tool when wielded by liberals to control group norms. But recalling that violence springs from the same root as violation helps us get at the meaning behind how the word is used. What is called violence is any violation of norms about legitimate use of force, norms dictated by the state and incorporated into our consensus reality. The debate about violence is really a coded discourse in which nonviolence stands in for consent; when we attempt to make space for autonomy and diversity of tactics, our opponents perceive us as disregarding consent simply for opposing the terms of consensus reality.

Observe how an anxious liberal from our local Occupy movement, dismayed by an illegal building occupation undertaken by autonomous occupiers, strives to distance the Occupy group from the occupation. He says to a reporter: “Our movement is nonviolent, it is peaceful, and it does not break the law.” The building occupation involved no physical violence, nor damage to property, nor anything that could be construed as violent even within his own definition, whereas the eviction by rifle-wielding thugs was violent enough to shock people across the political spectrum. How can we make sense of this seeming contradiction?

It seems that the meaningful sense of violence here is a rupture of consensus reality. This liberal wishes to communicate that the building occupation felt like a violation of his consent. Why? Because it was related to a current in which he felt invested, yet he had not been invited to participate in decision-making, and it involved actions that he personally disdained. Of course, we undertook the occupation autonomously precisely for that reason: we knew we could never achieve consensus in the public general assemblies to do something that so dramatically challenged consensus reality. Whether or not the occupation hurt anyone was beside the point: its “violence” had less to do with its literal effects than its challenge to consensus reality. To him, such a challenge constituted a violation of collective consent.

Let’s call this liberal consent: the notion that we must adhere tactically to the most conservative common denominator or else violate others’ consent. We all have to put up with this system, so the logic goes, whether we chose it or not, because any violation would put us all at risk. This goes beyond a critique of representation—you shouldn’t carry out an action on my behalf without my consent—to a critique of autonomy, since literally any action that presumes affinity with others is subject to the boundaries dictated by consensus reality.

This is the risk of embracing a framework of political consent. Within this logic, the most moderate elements of any group or coalition will dominate by virtue of their alignment with consensus reality. What’s OK for anybody is based on what’s OK for everybody, which makes our strategies for changing this world look suspiciously similar to the world we’re trying to change. If we do in fact desire a radical break with what exists, let’s not trap ourselves in a framework aligned with the systems we want to destroy.

Nonviolence is the only ideology that can comprehensively protect consensus reality against the antagonism of all who would transform it. By pre-emptively condemning anything that exceeds the parameters of civil discourse, it ensures that any resistance will ultimately strengthen the underlying framework of authority, and even passes responsibility for policing on to the loyal opposition. Liberal complicity with violent systems of control can be “nonviolent” according to this logic, because they accept the boundaries of legitimacy decreed by consensus reality. Just as every pacifist condemns armed struggle and insurrection against the state, the gains of every “nonviolent” movement and revolution they cite, from Dr. King to Gandhi, rested on a foundation of explicit or threatened state violence. We shake our heads at liberal reluctance to acknowledge that the state is fundamentally rather than incidentally violent, but that violence is woven so seamlessly into consensus reality that it simply doesn’t register.

The violence so anxiously opposed by liberals is, by definition, that which ruptures consensus reality. And this is precisely why we consider that violence necessary: framing resistance as registering our “dissent” does not attack consensus reality but merely identifies our position within it. There are not opposing partisans within consensus reality—Republicans and Democrats, activists and reactionaries—but only partisans of consensus reality and partisans against it.

In short, the liberal notion of consent is a barrier to revolution. By definition, breaking consensus reality cannot be consensual. We have to move beyond political consent discourse to imagine liberating strategies for transforming reality.

Can We Rescue the Political Discourse of Consent?

So liberal consent is a tool for defending consensus reality, useless to our project of liberation. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to give up on the discourse of consent itself. Are there ways to respond to these objections within a consent-based framework? Let’s explore some of the possible responses to liberal consent rhetoric.

Decision-making should be weighted to prioritize the most affected. According to this principle, the greater the impact a decision will have on a person, the more leverage he or she should have in the decision-making process. For instance, the opinions of a poor neighborhood’s long-term residents should count for more than those of developers or wealthier newcomers when determining whether to build new condominiums. Thus, how consensual an action is depends not on whether every citizen, equal under the law, would check yes or no about it on a ballot; rather, individuals’ feelings are weighted proportionally according to how the consequences will impact them.

This sidesteps some of the problems of negotiating political consent across power differentials; it looks attractive as a way to navigate conflicting priorities in a society based on values beyond the profit motive. But does this principle offer us useful guidance on how to get there? We can’t easily determine who will be most affected by strategies intended to create unpredictable situations so as to open up the horizon for transformation. Some activists see those most vulnerable to the potential consequences of militant tactics as the most impacted by any escalation beyond the confines of consensus reality politics. In practice, this concern can function to impose a tactical conservatism, reproducing the effect of liberal consensus and creating a dichotomy between resisting effectively and prioritizing others’ safety.[2]

On the other hand, in trying to legitimize our efforts according to this principle, we sometimes fall into the trap of using the example of a few individuals who support an action to stand in for an entire imagined demographic. We ascribe a mythical authenticity to specific local, working-class, indigenous, or other people who express enthusiasm for our activities, implicitly writing off those who don’t. We make such supporters into a sort of prosthesis for ourselves that entitles us to act against the ostensible majority, imagining our chosen comrades to represent the most affected. Every activist has a preferred imaginary friend, whether the workers favored by IWW organizers, the West Virginia locals courted by opponents of mountaintop removal, or the extras in hip hop videos that insurrectionists hope will join them in the streets.

This is not only tokenizing, but dangerous, as it can lead us to overestimate popular support for our actions. Yet it is supported by a variety of rationalizations: just because we don’t see public support doesn’t mean it isn’t there; the people who are most marginalized—who, we assume, are most likely to support our unpopular actions—are the least free to express that support publicly; and so on. There is some truth in these arguments. But when we gamble on this imaginary-friend fantasy as an effort to weigh by proxy the consent of the unrepresented—now represented by our presumed affinity with them—we’re just deluding ourselves.

Decision-making must be broadened to include all the people impacted. Often, many of those who will be impacted by supposedly consensual decisions do not have appropriate leverage on them. For instance, the university’s board of governors can decide by consensus to raise tuition, but what kind of consensus is that without the participation of the students who’ll be paying it? If decisions included all stakeholders and elites couldn’t impose them by force, wouldn’t there be hope for a politics of consent?

Unfortunately, this framework is more useful for preventing actions or challenging their validity after the fact than for initiating them. The impacts of our actions ripple out far beyond our ability to trace them or the range of lives they will touch. We cannot even hope to be aware of every person who would be impacted by a decision, much less solicit meaningful input from each of them to confirm or deny consensus. In practical terms, expanding the participation in decision-making to everyone affected would either require resorting to majority-rule democracy—not a consent-based framework—or accepting the impossibility of ever making decisions.

Here we have to confront the reality that broad consensus on many issues will never exist. We might be able to agree about what to cook for dinner, but on the real questions about how to organize society and distribute resources, no consensus is possible today. In a class society stratified by white supremacy and patriarchy, our interests are fundamentally in conflict. Certainly we share many interests in common, and we can imagine worlds in which people aren’t pitted against one another in contests for status and survival. But we will not be able to desert this world by consensus.[3]

We’re acting in self-defense. As this reasoning goes, the operation of oppressive institutions constitutes an attack on us, and we don’t need the consent of our attackers to defend ourselves. This harm isn’t always on a literal, direct, individual level, as in that specific Starbucks window makes my individual life increasingly precarious and impossible. In a hopelessly complex global economy that masks the root causes of the harm it creates, nearly any attempt to launch a defensive counterattack will seem either symbolic or misdirected. Still, in this sense, direct action can be framed as defending ourselves against violations of our consent by state and capital.

But the rhetoric of direct action as self-defense doesn’t offer us much guidance for how to move forward. In this model, state and capital are the protagonists, and the various formulations of we that we self-defend the mere objects of their actions. We can only react, not strategize new initiatives. Furthermore, the framework of self-defense is based in the terms of liberal individualism, with our private personal rights beginning where those of another end. What is it that we’re defending? Our role in society as defined under capitalism and patriarchy? Our rights as dictated by the democratic state? To get free, we should be fighting to destroy our selves! Not our bodies and lives, of course, but our selfhood as it’s constituted by state and capital.

If selfhood extends as far as the bank windows, if our selves overlap so extensively, we need another framework—we’re not just defending ourselves. At best, self-defense is a justification, not a praxis; at worst, it’s a disingenuous smokescreen that leaves us without a framework to evaluate our effectiveness.

Consent has to be informed. In all consent-based ethical systems, medical, sexual, and otherwise, authentic consent requires full knowledge of the implications of a decision. On the political level, this criticism goes, if we all had access to complete information, we would make decisions differently. This is the basic hypothesis of liberalism: the best of all possible worlds will result when people have access to all relevant information and the means to discuss it openly in order to make rational decisions.

The fatal flaw in this reasoning is that it fails to take power dynamics into account. When access to money and property determines our ability to act, under the rule of a state that reserves the sole right to employ violence, knowledge is not in fact power. Furthermore, it seems to demand a politics of total transparency, which would either preclude illegal activity or consign us all to the certainty of prison. An informed consent framework neither enables us to imagine how to achieve a consensus for revolution nor suffices to determine how much information to share with whom about the actions we take to fight for it.

* * * *

In concluding that the consent framework can’t accommodate our political needs, we’re not endorsing the violation of consent. Rather, we’re acknowledging that the consent framework has not been sufficient to transcend the self-defeating dichotomy between either respecting consent to such an extent that we can’t overthrow capitalism or disregarding it entirely. The point is to come up with a framework that solves those problems, not to throw out what gains we’ve made already.[4]

In fact, our basis for opposing capitalism and hierarchy goes far beyond the claim that these systems operate without our consent. Ultimately, we fight for new worlds out of desire, and in order to move beyond the limitations of political consent discourse we have to look more closely at what desire is.

Desire, Consent, and Politics

What is desire? Let’s conceive of desires not as internal elements emanating from within individuals, but as autonomous forces that flow through them. Individuals don’t desire things; whole societies produce and circulate desires, even if those desires remain submerged in most people. The fundamental unit of our analysis is not the individual human being, but the desire, with humans as the medium.

How can we conceive of desire and selfhood as they relate to consent and political action? The existing consent discourse presupposes static notions of self and desire. It presumes that desire is monolithic, composed of a single thrust rather than multiple pulls in different directions. When we have multiple desires, the desire that garners the plurality in our internal electoral process is assumed to be the only one that counts. Consent discourse presumes that what we want is knowable and can be articulated within the framework of our shared reality.

In reality, the desires we experience are not fixed or unitary. They shift constantly based on our experiences and contexts. They are multiple, contradictory, and divergent, surprising us with their diversity, frustrating us with their mutability. They resist our attempts to confine or domesticate them. They simply can’t fit into a two-dimensional binary model of consent, wherein we either want something or we don’t. This realization is terrifying, but it opens up new ways of understanding the revolutionary project in relation to the consensus reality arrayed against us.

The nature of desire is complex and centrifugal, in contrast to the simplifying and centripetal nature of interests. The traditional approach of the left is for organizers to assist constituencies in winning victories that build power, which will presumably be deployed towards increasingly radical ends. The goals of these victories are generally framed in terms of the interests of the constituency, not their desires. This is a clever trick: as interests appear to be an objective rather than subjective matter, it is easier for an outside managerial class to get away with defining and representing them. Interests can be framed as unitary, coherent, and integrative, whereas desires are multiple, inchoate, contradictory. Identity groups share interests; friends and lovers share desires. Interests are composed of calcified blocks of desire standardized to make sense within consensus reality.

Not only is desire far more complex and unstable than our discourses allow, it’s also shaped by the conditions of our misery and exploitation. Even amid contradictions and chaos, the range of what it is possible to desire rarely escapes the confines of consensus reality. Who really imagines that in a free world, we’d dream of ergonomic chairs for our cubicles, more TV channels and brands of detergent, longer chains and softer cages? This is not to demean the struggles of those who fight for better conditions within this system. It’s just to say that we would be paltry revolutionaries indeed if we based our programs merely on the consensus desires of groups whose allies we want to be.

The task of the revolutionary is not the task of the ally. We are not here to make the dreams of the proletariat come true. The proletariat is produced by capitalism, which we want to destroy. The task of the revolutionary is to shift our collective sense of the possible, so that our desires and the realities they drive us to create can shift in turn. We are here to transform reality beyond where our notions of consent can lead us. We need a different discourse to imagine the transformations that can open pathways out of consensus reality.

Introducing Seduction

There’s another framework that seems to be implied by our current practice, whether or not we acknowledge it. That framework is seduction.

What is seduction? It’s a rather unsavory concept, bringing to mind manipulative attempts to induce others to let themselves to be used for one’s own ends. In a sexual context, it can imply either a romantic, charismatic, persuasive use of charm to propose a sexual encounter, or a way to trick someone into succumbing to one’s advances. The connotations are discomfiting, but the salient factor is the implication that the seducer creates a desire, rather than simply unearthing it. It is this sense that we find most interesting in considering the problems of desire and consensus reality on the political level.

When we seduce, we present someone who ostensibly doesn’t want something with a new situation in which they may want it after all. Whereas consent focuses on obtaining the go-ahead for an external action—“Is this OK?”—seduction focuses internally, on desire: “Could you want this?” Our practices of seduction don’t aim to induce others to do things they don’t want to do, but to induce others to want to do them, in the most meaningful sense: to want to take on all the risks and pleasures they entail.

Again, we don’t believe that we can persuade everyone to consent to our dreams of anarchist revolution; not only is the deck stacked against us, but the dealer, the table, and the whole house. We don’t buy into the idea that our goals are what everybody “really” wants, nor do we assume that everyone would adopt our views if only they had access to all the right information. We don’t claim to represent anyone beyond ourselves, nor to stand in for any silent majority; in that sense, anarchist revolution is not a democratic project. Nor do we, despairing of those things, decide that to be true to our principles we must give up on transforming society altogether and retreat into isolation among the few comrades with whom we can establish meaningful self-determined consensus. We don’t think it’s hopeless to resist in the face of the stranglehold of consensus reality. We want a different path forward, one that doesn’t assume desire to be fixed, that doesn’t rely on liberal consent.

We neither wish to impose our will on others by force, nor to disregard their desires. Instead, we want to perform a kind of magic, an alchemical operation. We want to induce desires, not simply fulfill them.[5]

As anarchists, our greatest strength lies not in the coherence and reason of our ideology, but in the passionate actions we undertake and the ungovernable lives we lead. Let’s not try to convert people to anarchism; let’s set out, with mischievous glee, to infect everyone around us with the anarchy that flows in our veins. Let’s produce situations in which anarchy is possible, even likely—even desirable to those who might not feel any inclination towards it today.

How did you become an anarchist? Did you emerge from the womb in a black hoodie? Did you “always know” you were going to crave riots, stale bagels, and photocopy scams? If not, chances are you had some sort of experience that opened you to a sense of possibility you hadn’t previously been able to imagine. For me, it came at age 18, during the height of the anti-Iraq war protests, when I heard a vague rumor that I should show up at a certain concert. I did, and lo and behold, when it ended a group of maniacs appeared with drums and banners, and before I knew it I’d joined 200 others marching in the street, permits be damned. We were unstoppable. The blood boiled in my veins and I howled ecstatically until I lost my voice. Things were never the same again.

Now, I’d participated in polite permitted marches before. If you’d asked me if I desired to go on a feisty unpermitted midnight march, I probably would have thought it sounded cool. But I didn’t actively desire it beforehand; if I’d been forthrightly invited, I might have declined out of anxiousness or indifference. The desire was generated by the context, the mystery, and the experience itself. I suspect that the key was that it was unexpected and illicit: it took me beyond myself, opening some door of desire that couldn’t be shut. Had someone asked me in advance whether I would consent to participate, that might have undermined the very sense of liberation I experienced.

Trust me, I’m as uncomfortable with the implications of this as you are. But we need to look honestly at the transformative experiences that opened the door for us into radical politics and think about how we can construct and open those types of doors for others. If we’re not going to be a vanguard and we’re not going to convince everyone to join us through mere rational discourse, this might be what we’ve got to work with.

Transformation, Invitation, Contagion

How does seduction work? We hypothesize that seduction unfolds via three processes: transformation, invitation, and contagion. We transform circumstances, creating space for new possibilities and thus new desires to flourish; we invite others to participate in these new situations, to experiment with different modes of action and desire; and we infect others with curiosity, an insatiable desire for freedom, and the means to experiment towards it.

We strive for transformation because if we desire on the basis of what we know, we can only induce new desires that exceed the confines of our current reality by shifting the conditions in which we live. Sometimes it can be as simple as doing things in the street without permits, or using a park or building for an entirely new purpose. Disobedience is crucial to transformation; nothing opens up a sense of possibility like literally breaking the rules. But our behavior is constrained by far more than traffic laws and zoning regulations; social norms, gender roles, and innumerable other systems shape how we act, and each way we’re constrained provides new terrain for transformation. The key lies in challenging what’s taken for granted in a way that opens up the possibility to act differently, and to imagine how the world would be different if those rules and borders were no longer fixed.

Invitation requires neither persuasion via rational discourse nor imposition by force. Here we maintain the spirit of consent discourse, asserting our respect for the wishes of others and opposition to coercion. We aspire to a world based on voluntary association, in which participation is based on our own free choice rather than force or manipulation, and thus we aim to prefigure that world through our methods of creative resistance.

This can take many forms: leaving the doors open in the occupied building, modeling mutual aid at public Really Really Free Markets, offering black bandanas and cans of paint as the march leaves the show. Of course, we can’t literally invite others to participate in many actions beforehand, either because they have to be organized clandestinely or because we honestly don’t know what will happen. But we can shape our actions to maximize the agency of potential participants.

Seduction casts the invitee as the protagonist, the one whose agency counts—in contrast to consent discourse, which merely seeks permission. The whole point is for people to discover new desires, to want to do something they didn’t want before; they have to be in the driver’s seat for that to be possible. In this sense, we are using seduction to mean the opposite of its traditional negative connotation of trying to get something from people against their will or at their expense.

Finally, we aspire to invite others into practices that will prove contagious: ideas that self-replicate, models that can be applied in a variety of circumstances, attitudes that prove infectious. Contagion ensures that rebellion isn’t restricted to activists, scenesters, or any other particular group. Only when revolt spreads so widely that it can no longer be quarantined to a specific demographic will anarchy move permanently beyond the anarchists. We succeed when others emerge from the spaces we create feeling more powerful. We win when the ruptures of possibility we open prove impossible to close.

When Seduction Fails

Unfortunately, our actions don’t always achieve these goals. Sometimes we try to cast spells of transformation and they fail.

One way our efforts can go awry is when they position the organizing cabal as the protagonists rather than the invitees we hope to seduce into participation. In these cases, our actions don’t spread, but remain the province of a distinct group. For partisans of transformation, what counts is the circulation and contagion of subversive ideas and practices, not the power of a specific social body—be it anarchists or the Party.

Sometimes when our seductions fail, those we’ve attempted to invite feel used rather than seduced. Over the years, this has proved one of the primary causes of the unpopularity of unilateral militant activity. It’s flattering to be offered a role as a protagonist in an exciting story, but it isn’t so pleasant to feel that others are trying to take advantage of you. When people speak with frustration in a debriefing conversation about the lack of consent implicit in how an action played out, we must understand that as a failure of seduction. When they speak of consent, they’re describing their reaction to the actions that took place; our analysis of seduction treats the desires underlying these as the center of gravity.

Perhaps we can best understand such conflicts by reframing them: they are not merely contests between people with different desires, but contests between different desires playing out between people as well as within individuals. The failure of an unpopular action doesn’t stem from the fact that it failed to meet the desires of participants or bystanders. Rather, the action failed to enable subversive desires to arise or flow into new hosts. Critics who frame their objections in consent discourse may not be fundamentally opposed to the tactics in question after all; they may simply not feel that they had the chance to become protagonists in their own stories of rebellion.

Into the Unknown

What are anarchists good for? We don’t see ourselves as “the” revolutionary subject, nor its vanguard or representative. But that doesn’t mean we’re irrelevant to the struggles and upheavals around us. We up the ante and rep the anti; we call bluffs and take dares; we discover lines of flight out of consensus reality. We take risks to induce others to share them with us; we take care of each other so we can be dangerous together.

Ultimately, the politics of seduction don’t rely on rational argumentation to influence people. We dive headlong into the terrifying fires of transformation, allowing strange passions to seize us. It’s not that these desires are “ours”; rather, we are theirs. We become lightning rods that crackle with flows of charged desire.

Let’s not forget the importance of seducing ourselves with our actions. It’s frighteningly easy for activism to ossify into dreary, repetitive routines. Actions that don’t emerge out of our own desires are unlikely to seduce us or anyone else. Sure, some kids will be radicalized by the Food Not Bombs run by four burnt-out punks who resent every Sunday they spend in the kitchen. But we forge our deepest relationships of struggle in collectively experiencing the new, the exciting, the terrifying. It’s not only beautiful but strategic to live lives that push to the outermost edges of what’s possible.

The stakes are high. From consent discourse, we retain the prioritization of caring for others and paying attention to their needs. We must never disregard the well-being of those we invite into zones of transformation; yet neither can we play it safe and allow consensus reality to dictate our range of possible dreams and actions. We cannot promise safety, but we can share in the danger of the unknown, in its pleasures and its risks.

RALEIGH, N.C. — A number of people staged a protest Sunday at Central Prison in Raleigh.

The protesters say eight prisoners have been in solitary confinement since December when they staged a sit-down strike over work conditions in the prison kitchen.

At approximately 3:30pm today, Feb. 4^th, a group of about 50 demonstrators marched from a monthly Really Really Free Market to a nearby empty building owned by the CVS corporation.

Within minutes the crowd had taken over the building, hanging banners from the roof and windows, erecting tables outside with free food, and handing out welcome packets to passersby.

Others arrived with carpentry equipment, wood, furniture, a literature distro, and tools, and began building benches and tables. Some painted a large, cursive “Carrboro Commune @” and large squat symbols on the walls.

Still other supporters spread throughout the neighborhood, announcing the occupation and advertising an open neighborhood assembly in the building the following day.

The takeover, claimed by “anti-capitalists and occupiers” and done under the rubric of the “Carrboro Commune,” was aimed at holding the property permanently and building some kind of community or social center.

Eager to avoid the negative press and angry public backlash of an armed eviction of an occupied building late last year in neighboring Chapel Hill, police and the mayor were initially restrained. Unfortunately, the openness of the occupation towards random passersby also meant the Mayor himself was even in the building.

The occupation continued till around 7:30, after which police entered the building and began threatening arrests. A crowd of masked protesters left the building through a side door, chanting and carrying a banner to meet the crowd in front of the building. There were no arrests.

A bizarre scene then ensued in front of the building, where a large crowd of masked protesters, supporters, police, press, and local politicians packed together, screaming at each other in front of cameras. The mayor repeatedly tripped over his words, while some protesters cursed him and others gave speeches, chanted “ACAB”, and loudly vowed to return. One mainstream media outlet quoted Mayor Chilton as saying, “You’re full of crap,” in response to a masked person screaming about how impossible it is to survive in town on a service worker’s pay.

The Mayor’s sleek attempts to command the narrative of a peaceful de-occupation slowly started to slip away, eclipsed by the near violent hatred and frustration of a screaming crowd. The scene, which occurred in the busiest intersection of town in front of half a dozen cameras, was a bizarre shift for the supposedly tranquil and politically “conflict-free” small liberal town.

–

This is only a brief account by one participant. As of right now, we are still recovering from the last few hours, trying to figure out what went right and what went wrong. Certainly there will be a much more thorough account and analysis to come later; right now we would send our love and rage to all our comrades around the US and the world also struggling to reclaim a world that has been stolen from us.

We hope that our small efforts can inform and inspire others, and in particular offer some encouragement to our friends and comrades currently in jails on the West Coast, kidnapped for trying to also take back a future that has been stolen.

For the past 24 hours, the large space had been seized  by a group of “anti-capitalist occupiers” aimed at permanently squatting the building which had previously been empty for ten years. Banners and flags were hung across the front of the building and roof, an impromptu kitchen, zine distro, and tool area had been set up, and most of the boards removed from the large windows on the west side of the building.

While some were held down on the ground at gunpoint, a large crowd gathered outside the building, taking up a lane of traffic and screaming at the police.

Ultimately eight people were arrested, probably on trespassing or breaking and entering charges. We are waiting to hear back from the jail on the bail and charges situation, and will provide updates as soon as possible. A benefit show is already organized for tonight.

Just looking around the crowd during the raid, there’s more new and old faces showing up to support this occupation than ever before. This is definitely only the beginning.

To read mainstream press coverage, and see an incredible photo taken mid-raid (sure to be a PR nightmare for CHPD for years to come), check out this.

Ciao,

some anticapitalist occupiers

 ______

Last night, at about 8pm, a group of about 50 – 75 people occupied the 10,000 square foot Chrysler Building on the main street of downtown Chapel Hill. Notorious for having an owner who hates the city and has bad relations with the City Council, the giant building has sat empty for ten years. It is empty no longer.

Following the Carrboro Anarchist Bookfair, a group “in solidarity with occupations everywhere” marched to the building, amassing outside while banners reading “Occupy Everything” and “Capitalism left this building for DEAD, we brought it back to LIFE” were raised in the windows and lowered down the steep roof. Much of the crowd soon filed in through one of the garage door entrances to find a short film playing on the wall and dance music blasting.

People explored the gigantic building, and danced in the front room to images of comrades shattering the glass of bank windows 3,000 miles away in Oakland. Others continued to stay outside, shouting chants, giving speeches, and passing out hundreds of “Welcome” packets (complete with one among many possible future blueprints for the building – see below for text) to passersby. The text declared the initial occupation to be the work of “ autonomous anti-capitalist occupiers,” rather than Occupy Chapel Hill, but last evening’s events have already drawn the involvement of many Occupy Chapel Hill participants, who are camped just several blocks down the street.

Soon several police showed up, perhaps confused and waiting for orders. Three briefly entered the building, and were met with chants of “ACAB!” Strangely, the cops seem to have been called off, because they left as quick as they came. For the rest of the night they were conspicuously absent, leaving us free to conduct a short assembly as to what to do with the space and how to hold it for the near future. The group also decided to move a nearby noise and experimental art show into the building. As some folks began to arrange the show, others began filtering across town seeking things we needed for the night.

Within 30 minutes of the assembly ending, trucks began returning with everything from wooden pallets, doors, water jugs, and a desk, to a massive display case for an already growing distro and pots and trays of food donated by a nearby Indian restaurant. Others began spreading the word to the nearby Occupy Chapel Hill campsite, and bringing their camping gear into the building.

Over the next few hours more and more community members heard about the occupation and stopped by, some to bring food or other items, others just to soak it all in. All the while dozens of conversations were happening outside with people on the street. The show began eventually, and abrasive noise shook the walls of the building, interspersed with dance music and conversations, and ending with a beautiful a capella performance, and of course more dancing.

More events are to follow tomorrow in our new space, with two assemblies from the anarchist bookfair being moved to the new location, and a yoga teacher offering to teach a free class later in the afternoon.

As of the early hours this Sunday morning, the building remains in our hands, with a small black flag hanging over the front door. The first 48 hours will be extremely touch and go, but with a little luck, and a lot of public support, we aim to hold it in perpetuity. Regardless, we hope that this occupation can inspire others around the country. Strikes like the one in Oakland present one way forward; long term building occupations may present another.

-some anti-capitalist occupiers

For pics, you can go to www.trianarchy.wordpress.com

TEXT FROM THE “WELCOME” HANDOUT:

We would like to welcome you to an experiment.

For the past month and a half, thousands of people all over the US have been occupying public space in protest of economic inequality and hopelessness. This itself began as an experiment in a small park in New York City, though it did not emerge out of a vacuum: Occupy Wall St. “made sense” because of the rebels of Cairo, because of the indignados of Madrid and Barcelona and Athens. All of these rebellions were experiments in self-organization which emerged out of their own specific contexts, their own histories of struggle and revolution. Each were unique, but also united by the shared reality of the failure and decline of late global capitalism, and the futility of electoral politics.

Recently, this “Occupy” phenomenon has expanded beyond merely “providing a space for dialogue” to become a diverse movement actively seeking to shift the social terrain. From strikes and building occupations to marches and port blockades, this looks different in different places, as it should, but one thing is clear: Many are no longer content with “speaking truth to power,” for they understand that power does not listen.

Toward that end, we offer this building occupation as an experiment, as a possible way forward. For decades, occupied buildings have been a foundation for social movements around the world. In places as diverse as Brazil, South Africa, Spain, Mexico, and Germany, just to mention a few, they offer free spaces for everything from health clinics and daycare to urban gardening, theaters, and radical libraries. They are reclaimed spaces, taken back from wealthy landowners or slumlords, offered to the community as liberated space.

All across the US thousands upon thousands of commercial and residential spaces sit empty while more and more people are forced to sleep in the streets, or driven deep into poverty while trying to pay rent that increases without end. Chapel Hill is no different: this building has sat empty for years, gathering dust and equity for a lazy landlord hundreds of miles away, while rents in our town skyrocket beyond any service workers’ ability to pay them, while the homeless spend their nights in the cold, while gentrification makes profits for developers right up the street.

For these reasons, we see this occupation as a logical next step, both specific to the rent crisis in this city as well as generally for occupations nationwide. This is not an action orchestrated by Occupy Chapel Hill, but we invite any and all occupiers, workers, unemployed, or homeless folks to join us in figuring out what this space could be. We offer this “tour guide” merely as one possible blueprint among many, for the purpose of brainstorming the hundreds of uses to which such a building could be put to once freed from the stranglehold of rent.

In Love and Rage,

for liberty and equality,

-some autonomous anti-capitalist occupiers

Needless to say, cops arrived quickly on the scene and appeared increasingly nervous as the afternoon went on. A delegation of anarchists and ALKQN attempted to go in the building, but were prevented from doing so by armed guards and a terrified-looking Director.

After an hour and a half of drumming and screaming, we decided to march down the street so as to be in view of the rear half of Central Prison, the largest prison in the triangle-area. Though prevented from marching to the fence by a line of police cars, prisoners apparently could see us well enough to gather at the windows in the corridors of the facility, banging on the glass and pointing.

From there we marched back to our cars, taking the opportunity to take a group picture behind a beautiful black banner depicting a golden crown and the initials “ADR* – ACAB.” All in all we made a bunch of new friends yesterday, and will continue to organize with them into the future.

Though the Occupy movement has captured much attention as of late nationally, and elements of it such as Oakland’s general strike and building reclamation have inspired us, the struggle against prisons and policing in our state continues to be a major focus. We’d be lying if we did not say that this demo, as relatively tame as it was, felt like a breath of fresh air in contrast to the endless conversations by a recently disenfranchised middle-class about nonviolence and the “99%” which have surrounded us at various “occupations” in the triangle-area. Hopefully these struggles can intersect in a meaningful way, but it does seem that the “issues” of police and prisons will continue to be a major line in the sand relative to the racial and class topography of the Occupy movement.

Until Every Cage is Empty,

some NC anarchists against prisons

* ADR stands for Amor De Rey, a chant and slogan of the ALKQN.

**A brief news story and interview can be seen at: http://triangle.news14.com/content/top_stories/649140/family–friends-rally-for-inmates-in-solitary-confinement

*** For a more exhaustive reflection on anti-prison efforts in NC, check out: http://anarchistnews.org/node/1551

**** Below is the text from a handbill given out to media and passersby at the demo:

AGAINST PRISONS (and the world that creates them)

We are here to protest solitary confinement in NC prisons, and its use against politically active prisoners. The conditions are unbearable and amount to torture: years on end in a tiny cell with little to no stimulation 23 hours a day, unsanitary and inadequate food, no educational resources, completely inadequate “healthcare,” the consistent targeting of Black and Latino and politically conscious prisoners, a grievance procedure that amounts to a kangaroo court.

This protest comes on the back of the historic prisoners’ hunger strike against solitary confinement in California, which spread to over 11 facilities this summer, and inspired solidarity strikes in places as far away as Canada and Palestine. Prisoners in NC have been active for the last year as well, organizing radical study groups, staging a yard occupation in Windsor, hunger strikes in Taylorsville and Polkton, and speaking out against the beating of a handcuffed prisoner at Central Prison in Raleigh.

We are the family, friends, and supporters of those on the inside, both in general population as well as the “prison within a prison” that is solitary confinement. These people are our loved ones and comrades, stolen from us, from our families, crews, and neighborhoods, by the police and courts and this very Department of “Corrections.”

We do not accept this. We reject this modern-day plantation system. We will not sit by while our friends and family are tortured, while the prison walls continue to expand until all of society – work, school, the neighborhood, the city – resembles prison. We encourage everyone who has ever had a friend or brother or sister or parent behind bars, who has ever experienced the arrogant authority of a judge or cop, to join our protest in whatever way you can. If the whole world is like a prison, prison rebellion can happen anywhere.

—-

Two days ago, in the midst of a massive general strike which shut down the city of Oakland, CA, hundreds of occupiers took over a vacant building which had housed the homeless before it was foreclosed upon by bankers. In the windows of that building they stretched a massive banner which declared, “Occupy Everything.”

We are answering their call.

OCCUPY – NC D.O.C.

The second annual anarchist book fair in Carrboro, North Carolina will take place on Saturday, November 12. The book fair will run all at day; other events geared towards both organizing and entertainment will take place throughout the weekend. Book lovers, firebrands, and the simply curious are all invited! Anarchists have been in the news a lot this past year, and this is a good opportunity to find out what all the hubbub is really about.

Are you involved with a radical bookshop, organizing group, or publishing project? Don’t delay–email carrborobookfair@gmail.com to reserve a table, volunteer to help, or suggest activities. The deadline for reserving tables is November 1. We’ll also be hosting workshops, presentations, and discussions–feel free to propose to offer one.

You can learn more and get promotional materials at www.carrboroanarchistbookfair.wordpress.com. The venue is the same as last year: the Nightlight at 405 1/2 West Rosemary Street, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Just like last year, we are asking groups to pay a small tabling fee, but it’s important to us that tabling be accessible to groups that do not expect to make any money.

During the last decade, the growing movement toward prison abolition, coupled with mounting recognition of the need for community responses to gender violence, has led to increased interest in developing alternatives to government policing. Moving away from the notion of women as victims in need of police protection, grassroots groups, and activists are organizing community alternatives to calling 911. Such initiatives, however, are not new. Throughout the twentieth century, women have organized alter- native models of self-protection. This piece examines past and present models of women’s community self-defense practices against violence. By exploring the wide-ranging methods women across the globe have employed to protect themselves, their loved ones, and communities, this piece seeks to contribute to current conversations on promoting safety and account- ability without resorting to state-based policing and prisons.

STORYTELLING TO CONNECT PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Connecting past efforts to current initiatives allows us to both envision a future in which police and prisons are not the sole solutions to gender violence and to know that such possibilities can – and, in some small pockets, do or did – exist. In 2004, Mimi Kim launched Creative Interventions, a resource center to promote community-based responses to interpersonal violence. Recognizing that, while activ- ists and others are increasingly embracing the idea of community-based accountability as an alternative to the police, many have difficulty envisioning what accountability processes might look like. The group developed STOP (StoryTelling and Organizing Project), a resource for people to share their experiences with community-based accountability models and interventions to domestic violence, family violence, and sexual abuse. ‘In a lot of ways, we are building a long, long history of everyday people trying to end violence in ways that don’t play into oppressive structures,’ she stated (Huang, 2008, p. 60).

In their 2001 statement on gender violence and incarceration, Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence challenged communities to not only come up with ways to creatively address violence, but also to document these processes: ‘Transformative practices emerging from local communities should be documented and disseminated to promote collective responses to violence’ (Critical Resistance and INCITE! 2001). By connecting past and current organizing initiatives from across the globe, ‘Where Abolition Meets Actions’ hopes to contribute to the conversations around safety and abolition as well as inspires readers to organize in their own communities.

THE 1970S (WOMEN’S LIBERATION: DEFENDING THEMSELVES AND EACH OTHER)

Women’s liberation movements of the 1970s allowed women to begin talking openly about their experiences of sexual assault. Discussions led to a growing realization that women need to take their safety into their own hands and fight back. Some women formed street patrols to watch for and prevent violence against women. In Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, members of Women’s Liberation group Cell 16 began patrolling the streets where women often left their factory jobs after dark.

‘We were studying Tae Kwan Do and decided to intentionally patrol, offering to accompany women to their cars or to public transportation,’ recalled former Cell 16 member Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. ‘The first time two of us went to the nearby factory to offer our services to women workers, the first woman we approached looked terrified and hurried away. We surmised that my combat boots and army surplus garb were intimidating, so after that I dressed more conventionally.’ Later efforts were better received: Dunbar-Ortiz recalled that one night Cell 16 members met Mary Ann Weathers, an African-American woman, at a film screening. ‘After the film we introduced ourselves and told her we provided escorts for women. We asked her if she would like us to walk her home, as it was near midnight.

Mary Ann Weathers, who joined our group, marveled over the bizarre and wonderful experience of having five white women volunteer to protect her’ (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2001, p. 136). Dunbar-Ortiz also recalled that she traveled around the country speaking and encouraging women to form similar patrols. Students at Iowa State University and the University of Kentucky responded, forming patrols on their campus. The lack of police and judicial response to gender violence led to increasing recog- nition that women needed to learn to physically defend themselves from male violence. In 1969, Cell 16 established Tae Kwan Do classes for women. Unlike existing police offered self-defense classes that promoted fear rather than empowerment, Cell 16’s classes challenged students to draw the connections between their learned sense of helplessness and their role in society as women (Lafferty & Clark, 1970, pp. 96–97).

In 1974, believing that all people had the right to live free from violence and recognizing that women were often disproportionately impacted by violence, Nadia Telsey and Annie Ellman started Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts (BWMA) in New York City. ‘I have felt that it [self-defense] is connected to self-determination,’ stated Ellman. ‘We wanted to take our training into our own hands to prevent and avoid violence. We developed programs to reflect and understand that many people who came to our program were oppressed not just because they were women; there were multiple oppressions going on and we felt it was important to address them all.’ By the mid-1970s, the concept of women’s self-defense had become so popular that the demand for training sometimes exceeded the number of available instructors. A 1975 issue of Black Belt Woman, a feminist martial arts publication, ran an ad for certified women teachers by the Meechee Dojo in Minneapolis to fill the daily requests for self-defense workshops by schools, community groups, and continuing education programs (Lehmann, 1975, p. 19).

The idea of women taking training into their own hands to protect them from violence did not dissolve after the 1970s. Some of the programs and schools founded in the 1970s, such as the BWMA (renamed the Center for Anti-Violence Education or CAE in 1989) and Feminists in Self-Defense Training (FIST) in Olympia, Washing- ton, continue teaching women’s self-defense today. Women’s groups that emerged in later decades also took on the task of teaching women to defend themselves.

In 1992, women in Taos, New Mexico, responded to police indifference to gender violence by forming the Taos Women’s Self-Defense Project. Within two years, the Project had taught self-defense to over 400 women, presenting classes in public schools, busi- nesses and health departments (Giggans, 1994, p. 41). Although much of the 1970s rhetoric and organizing around gender violence presupposed that women were attacked by strangers, women also recognized and organized against violence perpetrated by those that they know, including spouses and intimate partners. In Neu-Isenburg, a small town near Frankfurt, Germany, a group of women called Fan-Shen decided that, rather than establish a shelter for battered women, they would force the abuser out of the house. When a battered woman called the local women’s shelter, the group arrived at her home to not only confront her abuser, but also occupy the house as round-the-clock guards to the woman until her abuser moved out. When the strategy was reported in 1977, Fan-Shen had already been successful in five instances (‘Women’s Patrol,’ 1977, p. 18).

Anti-violence organizing in communities of color Women’s Liberation groups were not the only ones to recognize the need for alterna- tive models of preventing gender violence. Communities of color in the USA also developed methods to ensure women’s safety without relying on a system that has historically ignored their safety or further threatened it by using gender violence as a pretext for increased force, brutality, and mass incarceration against community members.

In 1979, when Black women were found brutally murdered in Boston’s primarily Black Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods, residents organized the Dorchester Green Light Program. The program provided identifiable safe houses for women who were threatened or assaulted on the streets. Program coordinators, who lived in Dorchester, visited and spoke at community groups and gatherings in their areas. Residents interested in opening their homes as safe houses filled out applications, which included references and descriptions of the house living situation. The program screened each application and checked the references. Once accepted, the resident attended orientation sessions, which included self-defense instruction. They were then given a green light bulb for their porch light; when someone was at home, the green light was turned on as a signal to anyone in trouble. Within eight months, over 100 safe houses had been established (Dejanikus & Kelly, 1979, p. 7).

At a 1986 conference on ending violence against women at UCLA, Beth Richie spoke about a community-based intervention program in East Harlem, a New York neighborhood that was predominantly Black and Latino. Community residents orga- nized to take responsibility for women’s safety. ‘Safety watchers’ visited the house when called by the abused person or the neighbors. They encouraged the abuser to leave; if the abuser refused, the watchers stayed in the house. Their presence prevented further violence, at least while they were present. ‘Beth feels violence will probably continue but community consciousness has been raised,’ noted one confer- ence attendee. ‘In these communities, people do not call the police fearing more violence from the police. Men are not going to jail because the communities are work- ing together’ (Bustamante, 1986, p. 14).

Precedents and influences Women’s collective action and organizing to protect themselves and each other did not originate in the 1970s. In fact, some of the methods that emerged during the 1970s had been utilized by women’s groups of the past. In the 1920s, as more women began working in Shanghai’s cotton mills, they formed jiemei hui or sisterhood societies. In addition to providing acceptable ways for women to spend time together in a gender-segregated society, the jiemei hui also offered protection to their members. Local hoodlums gathered at the mill gates and seized women’s wages on paydays; on ordinary days, they collected money by ‘strip- ping a sheep’ (robbing a woman of her clothes and selling them for money). Female gangsters specialized in the lucrative business of kidnapping young girls to sell to brothels or as future daughters-in-law. Sexual abuse was a pervasive threat: many workers had family members or friends who had been raped, beaten, or kidnapped by neighborhood hoodlums. Members of sisterhoods walked together to and from the mills to protect each other from harassment and attacks. The number of jiemei hui increased during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai when women faced the addi- tional threat of assault by Japanese soldiers (Honig, 1997, p. 490).

During the same period, another form of women’s communal self-defense emerged in rural China. During the uneasy alliance between the Kuomintang (Nation- alist Party) and the Communists during the 1920s, women propagandists organized Women’s Associations in rural villages to provide support for the armies. Village women, however, began mobilizing around their immediate concerns such as foot binding, women’s education, a woman’s right to divorce, and abuse. Women’s Associations assumed the right to punish abusive husbands and in-laws, often through public humiliation (Croll, 1978, p. 202). In Hankou and other areas, the Women’s Associations forced the offending spouse or in-law to walk through the streets wearing a dunce cap and shouting slogans on behalf of women’s freedom (Strong, 1928, p. 126).

The 1927 split between the Kuomintang and the Communists halted the burgeon- ing women’s movement. The Kuomintang suppressed Women’s Associations, arrest- ing, punishing, and even executing known members. During the Japanese invasion, however, women propagandists once again followed the Communist armies to rural villages and instigated the formation of new Women’s Associations. Unlike their predecessors, Communist propagandists were met with skepticism about the possibility of ending abuse and gaining social and economic equality. The breakthrough came with the ‘speak bitterness’ meetings in which women were encouraged to talk about their sufferings. While propagandists originally encouraged women to hold these meetings against their local landlords, many identified their husbands and in-laws as their immediate oppressors. In these meetings, each woman learned that many other women in her village experienced the same oppressions. These women, who had been raised with the ancient notion that women were inferior, began recognizing and demanding their right to equality. They also realized the advantage of collective over individual action: ‘If we form a Women’s Association and everyone tells their bitterness in public, no one will dare to oppress you or any woman again,’ stated one rural woman (Belden, 1949, p. 24).

The new Women’s Associations also utilized group action to punish wife abuse, sometimes temporarily imprisoning and/or physically beating abusive men. However, the Women’s Associations did not need to imprison or beat every abuser. Sometimes the mere threat of a confrontation with the Women’s Association was usually enough. In the village of Fanshen, for instance, the Women’s Association beat several violent husbands. After that, the women only needed to have a ‘serious talk’ with the abuser to change his behavior (Hinton, 1966, p. 159). Contemporary organizing against gender violence Recent legislation, such as the U.S. Violence Against Women Act (1994), recognizes the problem of gender violence and seeks to increase police responsiveness. However, legislation does little to protect women who are politically, economically, or socially marginalized. Instead, the focus on criminalization and incarceration often places them at further risk of both interpersonal and state violence as well as of arrest, incar- ceration, and, for immigrant women, deportation (Critical Resistance and INCITE! 2001).

Knowing this, women have acted both individually and collectively to defend themselves. Sex workers, for instance, have organized in different ways to protect themselves from violence. Some methods are fairly straightforward. In March 2006, police responded to the murders of three sex workers in Daytona Beach, Florida, by cracking down on prosti- tution. In one weekend, 10 people were arrested in a prostitution sting. Recognizing that the police response did more to target than to protect them, street prostitutes began arming themselves with knives and other weapons to both to protect them- selves and each other and to find the killer. ‘We will get him first,’ declared Tonya Richardson, a Ridgewood Avenue prostitute, to Local 6 News. ‘When we find him, he is going to be sorry. It is as simple as that’ (‘Daytona Prostitutes,’ 2006).

In Montreal, sex workers have taken a different approach to ensure their safety. In 1995, sex workers, public health researchers, and sympathizers formed Stella, a sex workers’ alliance. Instead of knives and other weapons, the group arms sex workers with information and support to help them keep safe. Stella compiles, updates, and circulates a Bad Tricks and Assaulters list, enabling sex workers to share information and avoid dangerous situations. It also produces and provides free reference guides that cover working conditions, current solicitation laws, and health information. Recognizing that the criminalization of activities related to the sex industry renders sex workers vulnerable to both outside violence and police abuse, the group also advo- cates for the decriminalization of these acts (Stella, n.d.). Sex workers are also taking direct action to stop sex trafficking.

In 1997, former sex workers began guarding checkpoints along the Nepal–India border to rescue adolescent Nepalese girls from being smuggled into India. The idea emerged with the women living at Maiti Nepal, a home in Kathmandu for women returning from Indian brothels. Many of the women, who had been kidnapped as adolescents and sold into the sex industry, were ashamed and angry about their experiences and wanted to trans- form their anger into action. They set up four guard posts along the border and began monitoring for human trafficking. During the first three years, the women caught 70 traffickers, saving 240 girls from India’s brothels. ‘All the girls want to go to the border,’ stated Anuradha Koirala, who runs Maiti Nepal. ‘They are angry but don’t know how to express themselves.’ Being able to rescue others from similar fates has helped many of the women reclaim their sense of self-worth: at the age of 14, Sushma Katuwal was sold to an Indian brothel where she was infected with HIV. After being held for 13 months, she returned to Kathmandu. ‘I came back from hell,’ she recalled. ‘I am trying to stop these girls from being sold like I was.’ In 2000 alone, the 19-year-old rescued 15 girls and caught four human traffickers. ‘As long as I survive, this is what I am going to do,’ she declared (Filkins, 2000, p. 1).

Women marginalized by other factors, such as racism and poverty, have also orga- nized to protect themselves against both interpersonal and state violence. In 2000, the police murders of two young women of color sparked a dialogue about violence against women among members of Sista II Sista, a collective of women of color in Brooklyn, New York. The group’s preexisting work had empowered young women of color to identify and work toward solving their own problems. Their response was to form Sistas Liberated Ground, a zone in their neighborhood where crimes against women would not be tolerated. ‘We wanted the community to stand up against violence as a long-term solution because our dependence on a police system that was inherently sexist, homophobic, racist, and classist did not decrease the ongo- ing violence against women we were seeing in our neighborhoods. In fact, at times, the police themselves were its main perpetrators,’ members of the group stated in 2007 (Burrowes, Cousins, Rojas, & Ude, 2007, p. 229).

Sista II Sista instituted an ‘action line,’ which women could call, inform the group about violence in their lives, and explore the options that they – and the group – could take to change the situation. In addition, Sista II Sista established Sister Circles which, similar to the ‘speak bitter- ness’ meetings of the Communist Women’s Associations in China, allowed women to talk about violence and other problems in their daily lives and encouraged the commu- nity – rather than the individual woman – to find solutions. In one instance, a woman at the Sister Circle talked about the man who had been stalking her for over a year. Although no physical violence had occurred, he was becoming increasingly aggressive toward her. Members of the Sister Circle confronted the man at the barbershop where he worked. When they learned about his actions, his male co-workers told the stalker that, if he continued to harass the woman, he would be fired. He stopped stalking her (Ude, 2006).

CREATING COMMUNITIES TO DETER VIOLENCE

Not all strategies to prevent gender violence are easily classified as ‘policing from below.’ Some grassroots groups and coalitions recognize that building communities is the first line of defense against violence and are organizing to create social structures and support networks that can collectively address harmful situations.

In Durham, North Carolina, in the aftermath of the 2006 rape of a Black woman by members of a Duke University lacrosse team, women of color and survivors of sexual violence formed UBUNTU. UBUNTU, named after the Bantu meaning ‘I am because we are,’ is a coalition working to ‘facilitate a systematic transformation of our communities until the day that sexual violence does not occur’ (UBUNTU). Alexis Pauline Gumbs recounted an instance in which an UBUNTU member encountered a woman who had been beaten by her former partner:

This UBUNTU member called the rest of us to see who was home and available in the direct neighborhood, took the young woman into her home and contacted the spiritual leader of the woman who had experienced the violence along with other women that the young woman trusted from her spiritual community, who also came to the home, and made sure that she was able to receive medical care. She also arranged for members of our UBUNTU family to have a tea session with the young woman to talk about healing and options, to share our experiences, to embrace the young woman and to let her know that she wasn’t alone in her healing process. (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2008, pp. 80–81)

Gumbs noted:

These responses were invented on the spot … without a pre-existing model or a logistical agreement. But they were also made possible by a larger agreement that we as a collec- tive of people living all over the city are committed to responding to gendered violence. This comes out of the political education and collective healing work that we have done, and the building of relationships that strongly send the message … you can call me if you need something, or if you don’t. You can call me to be there for you … or someone that you need help being there for. I think it is very important that we have been able to see each other as resources so that when we are faced with violent situations we don’t think our only option is to call the state.

In that way, everything that we do to create community, from childcare to community gardening (our new project!), to community dinners, to film screenings, to political discussions helps to clarify how, why, and how deeply we are ready to be there for each other in times of violence and celebration. (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2008, p. 81)

From this community-building, UBUNTU members began organizing around the idea of a Harm-Free Zone – an area in which violence would be addressed by the community rather than by the police.

‘We shall see [what this looks like in practice] because we’re still at the beginning of it,’ stated Gumbs in 2009, a year after the idea of a Harm-Free Zone emerged. ‘A lot of times we talk about community as if it already exists, but I don’t actually think that we have autonomous, completely sustained community. We live with all sorts of dependence on the state, [on] outside institutions. We have a lot of work to do to have the type of communications and support that would fulfill the needs of our community.’

Like the Dorchester Green Light Program, organizers of the Harm-Free Zone brought these ideas to the communities of which they were already a part. ‘Those of us who came together were already working in those settings, so it wasn’t just [us] going and taking over the local elementary school. Somebody’s mom was inspired by what somebody [on the committee] said and invited them to come and speak at [the school’s] Women’s History Month,’ recalled Gumbs. ‘For each of us, we’re thinking about how we bring that analysis and that ideal into our preexisting communities.’

CONCLUSION

Many early anti-violence efforts addressed immediate instances of gender violence, often focusing on the physical aspects of self-defense or a direct response to violence. Women’s organizations taught self-defense classes, confronted abusers and assailants, and formed protective groups to escort each other safely through the streets. In contrast, contemporary organizing often utilizes a multilayered approach, creatively addressing not only immediate instances of violence but also creating dialogue to challenge and change some of the root causes of gender violence. For instance, the efforts of Stella and UBUNTU are not traditionally seen as self-defense tactics, but they do work to keep women safe from violence. Despite these differences, each project emphasizes the importance of community – as opposed to individual – actions and responses. None of these projects – from the Women’s Associations of the 1920s and 1940s to the Dorchester Green Light program in Massachusetts to the contempo- rary organizing among sex workers – would have succeeded without a collective sense of responsibility toward each other.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs has described UBUNTU’s fledgling Harm-Free Zone as ‘building safety from the ground up’: ‘When we say “from the ground up,” [we’re talking about] really participating in the full life of a community and not just creating a special utopia of ten friends who have a vision that’s so abolitionist and radical,’ she elaborated.

Annie Ellman also talked about the importance of community and community- building: ‘What people gain here [at BWMA] besides self-defense skills is some understanding about collective action, about struggling with your community … If we believe that people have the right to live free of violence, we have to work together to try to transform our communities as ones who will stand up and fight against different kinds of injustice.’

While not every project and group explicitly identifies as an abolitionist group, their practices work toward a radical re-envisioning of creating safety without relying on police. In addition, some groups do work with other antiviolence and abolitionist organizations.

BWMA has, at times, joined in coalition work against police brutality and in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal as well as women incarcerated for self-defense. By the time it changed its name in 1989, CAE had broadened its focus to teach self-defense to other populations disproportionately impacted by violence such as gay men, trans- gender people, people living with HIV and AIDS, and queer homeless youth (of all genders). ‘What we often do is we go out and do educational work for organizations that are more on the front lines doing organizing work,’ stated Ellman. After 9/11 increased racist violence against Arab American, South Asian, and Muslim commu- nities, CAE provided free self-defense and violence prevention workshops to women at grassroots organizations that served these communities (‘Spotlight on Community Action,’ 2004, p. 19).

Alexis Pauline Gumbs noted that UBUNTU’s Harm-Free Zone organizing was inspired and influenced by Critical Resistance organizing: one member had previously helped organize a Harm-Free Zone with the New York City Critical Resistance chapter and several people were part of both the Durham chapter of Critical Resistance and the Harm-Free Zone organizing committee.

Although each of the initiatives described works specifically in certain communi- ties, there is the potential for these models to be shared and adapted to other locations and situations.

Gumbs pointed to the Gulabi Gang, a group of women in India who physically punish abusive husbands, and to Sistahs Liberated Ground as inspirations for the Harm-Free Zone organizing in Durham: ‘We understand that work in that context while also understanding that our conditions are really specific.’

Other groups have also drawn on past and present models of collective action and community accountability processes. The 1970s German women’s group Fan-Shen derived its name from the model Chinese village where Women’s Associations stopped wife abuse. More recently, activists in Santa Cruz were influenced by a docu- mentary about a 1970s feminist group that collectively confronted sexual assaulters, forming Snap Back! in 2002. Snap Back! members used a similar tactic to confront a man who had sexually assaulted their friend. ‘We went to his house at night with her and we made him come outside,’ recalled Snap Back! member Megan Reed. ‘She talked to him about what had happened while the rest of us stood there showing soli- darity with her. She decided to go inside to have a longer conversation with him (about an hour). Then we left.’

Although nothing more happened, Reed believed that their action had further- reaching effects: ‘I think it scared the crap out of him and he’ll think twice before doing anything like that again,’ she stated. The action also ‘gave her [the survivor] a sense of closure. If you don’t want to go through the legal system, there are few alter- natives as to what you can do to get closure and confront that person and feel that a politically justifiable result has been attained.’ Knowledge about a past group’s approaches toward sexual assault enabled Snap Back! members to help their friend confront her assailant in a way that did not involve the police or prisons.

‘Where Abolition Meets Actions’ utilizes Mimi Kim’s storytelling approach to envision different possibilities of a world without policing and prisons. These models are important for imagining and then realizing abolitionist principles. By examining the variety of approaches in their vastly different contexts, we can begin to connect the abstract ideal with concrete actions that make another world possible. We should be drawing lessons from these projects and approaches to create models that work for our own locations and communities.

NOTES

Acknowledgments

As an independent researcher, I am blessed to have a network of friends, writers, and activists who provide crucial support. For this article, I owe much thanks and appreciation to China Martens for feedback on early drafts, Jessica Ross for introducing me to several of the women interviewed as well as extensive feedback, and Jenna Freedman for material support. This article could not have been written without them. This article orignially appeared in the journal Contemporary Justice Review.

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