Above photo: Woman with raised fists wearing protective face mask while supporting anti-racism demonstrations.
Militant Strategy.
I have been asked for a plan for dealing with current and coming political threats many times, and I’ve always felt that these requests had anti-democratic undertones. I could respond with some ideas, of course, but one individual’s grand plan for shifting The Left’s relationship to American elections means nothing to me. I believe that we need to know what people are willing to commit to in real life to create a real plan. Any strategy outside of this context is closer to imagination than action, which may be valuable but is not tangible. That said, I do think it is helpful to point folks in the direction of inquiries that could help them reach deeper political clarity—and I hope I can do that now. Specifically, I’d like to think through the ways The South can build power toward Black liberation, disposing of fascism and fascists in the process—beyond the limits of the American “democratic” apparatus and the anti-Southern Left’s current common approaches.
The Black South has a rich history of antifascist organizing and militant strategy through direct struggle and conflict with fascistic forces. If we are going to study and promote an organizing lineage, it is this one that we should look to. What would it look like for our movement’s rallying cry to evolve from “My ancestors died for the right to vote” to “My ancestors died fighting fascism”? This move does not intend to erase nor obscure historic political struggles of The South that center voting; such a reduction is counter-insurgency. I acknowledge that the Southern voting rights struggles done under the boot of Jim Crow fascist terror is an important part of this tradition, but that overemphasized history should not be the locus upon which our present struggle is anchored, nor should honoring it by remaining uncritically devoted to America’s violent democracy be our strategic stop sign.
We also must value the strategy inherent to stories of Black Southerners fighting for their lives in what can only be characterized as committed militance, as it is a militant defense that made “universal” voting rights possible. If we are going to keep saying voting and electoral organizing are just one part of this struggle, we need to treat it as the one part that it is, rather than the whole. This claim is made often, despite it being followed up with progressive and leftist organizations dedicating all or most of their staff capacity to electoral organizing.
My clarity regarding the limits of electoral centricity and engaging The State as an anti-Southern counterinsurgency strategy comes from being a local organizer in the struggle against Atlanta’s Cop City. The StopCopCity movement, now a multi-year struggle that has evolved significantly from its early phone zaps and encampments, has clarified what a shift in strategy means materially.
Before 2023, direct confrontation with the State was at the core of the StopCopCity movement strategy. This included mass mobilizations to city council meetings, hours and hours of phone calls, protests, canvassing in and beyond Atlanta, and globalizing support for the campaign through solidarity campaigns. The strategy that actually stalled construction, however, was less respectable, more militant: the destruction of machinery, occupation of the forest, and targeting of insurance companies and contractors in other locations. I have often wondered what things would look like, in this movement and others, if these insurgent acts had been given even a fraction of the resources and attention that electoral elements enjoy. Of the 100,000+ land lease cancellation referendum petition signatories, could we get 1,000 to agree to house and feed antifascist resistors? I don’t know if we’ll ever find out, but I do think this should be a possibility, right? If not, what was all of this for?
To their credit, those working on the Vote to StopCopCity campaign have been consistent in not falling into the trap of alienating the more militant elements of the movement through their narrative choices, including their dedication to reframing diversity of tactics conversations around the damage being done by the State. I think that electoral organizers can take note of this, though this strategy is not itself absent the need for further interrogation.
Last year, I wrote a piece highlighting the unique solidarity economy elements present in the StopCopCity movement and the role this work plays in helping to sustain and stabilize the movement. StopCopCity’s solidarity economy and larger mutual aid efforts have inspired folks to consider attending to the needs of each other in a way many other movements haven’t and that has helped foster a genuine sense of community and solidarity (Shocker!).
What does this tell us about a way forward? Well, I think we need to be attentive to the ways movements and movement organizations can delegitimize or legitimize the State, and take note of which ones are doing this. Politically, mutual aid inherently drives questions about whether we need a State at all and by comparison, many aspects of electoral organizing strategy fundamentally operate under the assumption that if the people’s dissent leverages the “proper” channels of civic engagement, the State will listen and is obligated to respond.
Surely, referendum organizers understand that it’s hard to collect signatures without also assuring people that the State will not mishandle their records—a message that conveys some inherent safety and reliability. Unfortunately, now thousands of Atlantans have been functionally doxxed by the city. We have also witnessed, first hand, the many ways Atlanta’s Democratic public officials have undermined democracy to drive the Cop City project forward. This has led to a certain air of disillusionment—and this alienation of the local electorate impacted the presidential election.
As the early voting numbers rolled in for Georgia, the Black voter turnout appeared to be on track to break yet another record. Despite this, one of the South’s most contentious battleground states flipped back to red, crushing the Democrats and The Progressive Left’s hopes that a blue Georgia could swing the nation away from another Trump administration. I wonder, will the disillusionment stick? Will the exposed contradictions in the local Atlanta government continue to influence political outcomes? If so, this phenomenon puts into crisis, the onus placed on movement organizations to deliver on the promise of demonstrably radicalizing the voting public by engaging them in electoral processes. Even if the state did remain blue, The Left would still also have to contend with the progressive wing of the electorate voting for a much more conservative version of the same party four years later.
Atlanta, like other places with large Black populations in and beyond The South, were and will remain key in delivering elections for the Democrats. For that reason, the struggles of Black Southern folks will continue to be readily reduced to “vote blue” liberal talking point fodder that obscures the oppressive context of their material conditions.
The political repression that national and Southern Dems fund and foment, from StopCopCity to Free Palestine, is leveraged to tell Black Southerners to vote blue. As Andre Dickens works hand in hand with Georgia’s far-right Republican governor Brian Kemp, a notorious voter suppressionist, to bury the referendum, bury forest defenders, and ban bail funds, the state’s Democratic Senators Warnock and Ossoff—whose elections solidified the 2020 blue sweep—have been absent when called on to help fight for democracy. After Stacey Abrams, the Democratic Party’s noted crusader against voter suppression, campaigned on increasing police salaries during her second bid for governor in 2022, she and her organization waited until the referendum had been held up to say anything about Cop City. Even then, they only gave a milquetoast statement about the referendum, functionally ignoring the broader anti-democratic context of the project. If the response to all of this from The Progressive Left is “We must endorse Democrats,” what conclusions do their followers come to? Are they led toward liberation, or neoliberalism, or something far more sinister?
As companies like BioLab spread chlorine gas across metro Atlanta, progressive left organizations unflinchingly endorsed the least environmentally responsible Democratic platform we’ve seen in years. All of the nuance and painstaking language in the world cannot change the meaning of the word endorsement given the stakes of the worsening climate catastrophe.
While they burn mail-in ballot boxes in Portland and other cities, they simply cancel and purge voter rolls and refuse to accept ballots in Georgia. And rather than talking to constituents about the merits of automatic voter registrations that other countries implement to stave off suppression, we are told by politicians and their endorsers to “Put our feelings aside and just show up. They can’t cancel all of our registrations!”
I suppose not.
But how many votes would we need for the US military and the US-Israeli military outpost to stop dropping so many bombs that further destroy the climate? The conditions call for more direct action and strategy against the state to end our suffering, an escalation The Progressive Left elements don’t dare imagine. The great irony here is, of course, that with the numbers The Progressive Left has, far more material change could be delivered if they really believed it were possible. Because of their efforts to exempt themselves from responsibility for more militant resistance, what is to be done is rendered intangible. Ultimately, there remains room for a diversity of tactics in anti-fascist struggle, and within it, people will find their roles. I believe that large change can be driven by small contingents where necessary. What feels irresponsible, and even counterinsurgent, is lying about what these compromises and contradictions mean.
How do we engage the elections without lying about what they can and cannot accomplish?
My basic assertion is that we don’t have to lie to the public about what this moment means in order to engage them. We lie and oversimplify for convenience, not for strategic purposes. Therefore, I am interested in how we strategize for liberation, with the collective recognition that the ballot box—especially in service of electing heads of an anti-Black settler colonial state—will never deliver this. In my experience, most people recognize this but taking the step to let these truths actually influence our political culture and action is another thing entirely. In the wake of this election, the Black Southern Left and those who claim to be in coalition with us must ask:
How do we organize with revolutionary militancy at the center, where matters concerning whether we vote, and who for, is a conclusion that can be reached democratically as a function of our organizing but does not define or constrict our work?
How can we rebalance and redistribute resources for organizing? We could be trying to find ways to creatively repurpose “electoral” funds for underground organizing needs, and break dependencies on State-affiliated funding altogether.
How can we honor the antifascist traditions of Black Southerners and build upon their defense strategies, rather than shifting attention toward purported saviors from the Black misleadership class?
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army member, recently said, “We can’t organize the way we organized back in the 60s, we can’t organize the way we organized even 30 years ago, 20 years ago. We’ve got to break new political ground and have new political theory and new political tactics.”
I take this invitation seriously.
Unless The Left abandons notions and myths that tether us to outdated and outgunned modes of thinking and praxis, we will continue to suffer the same defeats that movements of the past have endured. This new rise of fascism demands a refreshed antifascist, anti-imperialist, decolonial feminist, anti-capitalist Black liberation movement that has been and will remain rooted in the South. The Left, specifically The Progressive Left, threatens the potential for the evolution of our movements so long as they remain attached to these myths that deepen the participation of the masses in contradictions that keep them, us, captive.
Julian Rose is a community organizer, educator, and writer originally from Hartford, CT, and currently based in Atlanta, GA. His work focuses on Black Queer Feminism, abolition, and solidarity economy movement building. Julian’s political home is Endstate ATL. Other Atlanta organizing efforts he has been involved in include the Free Atlanta Abolition Movement, a Black-run bail formation, and Barred Business’ Protected Campaign.