Mass media has continued the work to delineate between peaceful and violent protesters with sprinklings of the outside agitators to maintain a ruse of democracy and progress while fooling you into thinking protesters threaten them. Violent protesters are simply people who protest. The very dignity of a protest is measured only by its capacity to be violent, and any act of dissent is violence to the state. This is why they bring weapons of war to what amounts to no more than sign-making parties. What other ways do you stop violence? To clarify, our violence may not be shootouts with the cops, and it will be won by throwing rocks and bottles just as fast as it will be won in courtrooms: neither are fast nor likely victories. It might be occupations, cuss-outs, or things we cannot yet determine, but there is no need to label “peaceful” what the state will inevitably read as violent.
We’ve repeated endlessly that the state has a monopoly on violence—because they do. They have more advanced weapons and armies willing to do their bidding, even at their own expense, even as they are being replaced by robotic dogs. As was the case with Tortuguita, we know the state will meet “peaceful” protesters with violence, and we know people will be punished for protesting, regardless of any legal commentary to the contrary. So if you decide to fight, you might as well fight like you’re going down anyway.
If there is a distinction, there are those who protest and fight to the death for the living, and then there is everyone else, who live to kill or die—so those who protest and those who don’t. Separately, I want to make the case for the Chaotic Protestor. The Chaotic Protestors are those who aspire to be untraceable, untrackable actors creating unpredictable situations; they deliver the indeterminate. I think we’ve given these folks a bad rap, when in reality they are the people creating the conditions necessary for our successes. But the Chaotic Protestor, as implied by the rhetoric of its title, is at odds with the movement organizer. Therein lies a problem: solidarity remains fleeting, as the latter is tasked with the duty to establish order and legibility, while the former is committed to random acts of obstructing the state’s path to maintaining its mastery. Metaphorically speaking, if the organizer is at all on that path, sweeping up the crumbs of erasure left in the state’s path of destruction, the Chaotic Protester is in the organizer’s way. But we know from the Basotho narrative that pure brilliance can emerge from chaos, and if we who are engaged in any capacity on the frontlines struggle to track or capture movement activity, so will the state.
The organizer sets the conditions for capture, with dustpan and broom, and the chaotic protester sets conditions for evasion.
We needn’t mistake chaos with structurelessness—there is always a structure, or a few, at play. In lieu of centering structure, perhaps a more appropriate relation to attend to is that between chaos and experimentation. I posit this strategy as a necessary shift towards continuing the Black Radical Tradition, absent an allegiance to past strategies that failed to end captive suffering. The relationships between chaos and experimentation is the Black Radical Tradition, and rather than filtering the failed blueprints of our valiant forewarriors into peaceful or violent, it is important to remember them, learn from them, and iterate as they did for us.
Jack Halberstam’s introductory essay in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons revives the Fanonian roots of a dichotomy between rational and crazy, which are perhaps subconscious synonyms for violent and nonviolent. He writes:
“Moten reminds us that even as Fanon took an anti-colonial stance, he knew that it ‘looks crazy’ but, Fanon, as a psychiatrist, also knew not to accept this organic division between the rational and the crazy and he knew that it would be crazy for him not to take that stance in a world that had assigned to him the role of the unreal, the primitive and the wild.”
This is the trap we fall into, as it creates the logic of a peaceful protester. We decry its use in media narratives, but we follow the logic when we label our resistance “peaceful” or demand that it must be peaceful, organized, and therefore legible for mass acceptance and participation. We’re trying to avoid looking crazy, but to whom?5
Halberstam continues: “Fanon, according to Moten, wants not the end of colonialism but the end of the standpoint from which colonialism makes sense.” We denounce the binary of the violent versus nonviolent protester without removing ourselves from the standpoint from which such a dichotomy would make sense, least of all as a way to categorize our protesting. Further implying we organizers are still fighting the state from the standpoint of its own episteme. Even if that logic informed a tactic that was strategic and valiant 30 to 60 years ago, our context has changed and adapted to absorb and disarm what was once meaningful dissent.
“Blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon,” Halberstam summarizes, “is the willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order.” That space is definitively movement. The abandoned space from which the Chaotic Protester picks up the Black Radical Tradition; the space from where we experiment, remember, and continue, as opposed to simply imagine or fill in where the state has failed to include us. Consequently, in the lineage of Fanonian discourse through Moten’s interpretation, the Chaotic Protester isn’t a set of assignments or a checklist, but rather, it’s a thing to become; a disposition to inhabit.
Tortuguita, a beautiful, young soul killed by police during a forest raid on January 18, 2023, had 57 bullet wounds in their body. After that, there should be no version of us showing up and expecting anything except violence. This is not abandonment of strategy nor a call to bear arms. It’s a sobering disabusing of ourselves from the violence versus nonviolence binary towards chaos and madness brought on by our increasing capacity for experimentation.
A music festival in March following Tortuguita’s murder by Georgia State Patrol, Atlanta Police Foundation, Andre Dickens, Atlanta City Council, and all other parties involved in the construction of this facility, ended with a direct action that led to many unfounded arrests. People feel the events that occurred during the March 5 rally were unsafe. Perhaps it could be argued they weren’t strategic, but if we believe we are always unsafe in a world run by the state, the unsafe modifier becomes complicated even while correct. If you live in a world where knocking on someone’s door or getting into the wrong car or camping in a forest can get you murdered, aren’t you already unsafe? Perhaps the larger fallacy is a misunderstanding of the phrase “Stop Cop City”—that peace is attainable without winning war or supporting a rally or protest in any form against the state is supposed to be safe. Actions like those that took place on March 5 are the indeterminations we owe to one another.
