ACAB. A common slogan spray-painted on bridges and shouted at actions. It means “All Cops Are Bastards”, and it goes beyond the not-so-recent spate of police brutality against black folks. All cops are bastards because all cops, every single one, enforces oppression for a living. They volunteered to be the footsoldiers of capitalism and hierarchy in our society. Why can’t we simply walk into our shop one day and tell our boss to fuck off, and seize the means of production in one fell swoop? Because the boss will call the cops, and the cops will come and enforce the boss’s domination over us. That’s all property really is; a property deed is just a receipt that can be redeemed for violence.
So it’s hardly surprising that in Charlottesville the pigs continued their pattern of defending white supremacists. The fascists showed up armed and looking for a brawl, and the cops’ backs were fully turned to them; there was no question about who they were protecting.
Now, the Charlottesville rally today outnumbered the fascists by a solid ten to one. Had they been alone, the enemy would’ve been lucky to have been simply run out of town. But when confronting the fascists, we must always remember to include the cops in their ranks. And while we have numbers, the cops have resources.
Wars are won by logistics. This is the most basic fact of military science; modern warfare fundamentally comes down to logistics. If you want to be an effective fighting force you must maintain the supply chains necessary to continue fighting–you need to always have enough beans, bullets, and band-aids to carry on. This, combined with the above, led me to an epiphany: if we want to effectively fight fascism, we must attack police logistics. We must drain them at every opportunity. We must frustrate, as best we can, every attempt by the police to maintain their ability to do violence. Every dollar spent replacing smashed cruiser windshields is a dollar that can’t be spent on tear gas or rubber bullets or pig salaries.
And the best part is that, for the guerrilla, this is by far the easiest way to engage the enemy. Supply chains are, by their nature, very hard to secure, meaning that an attacker almost always has the advantage. It can be little things–dropping homemade caltrops in front of a parked cruiser, smashing up police cars as they sit in their lot at night, a midnight raid to spray-paint over CCTV cameras, escalating up to traffic stop de-arrests and Molotovs in the precinct windows. In these situations we have the advantage. During the protest, the cops are armed, armored, and organized; during the workday, they’re unprepared and spread thin.
In the words of insurrectionary anarchist Alfred M. Bonnano, “It’s easy. You can do it by yourself, or with a bunch of trusted comrades. You don’t need to have great means or technical competence. Capital is vulnerable, if you are only determined to act.”
All these are basics of guerrilla warfare. Here’s some other basics:
- Guerrilla works best in places where your actions are supported by the locals. At the very least places where people hate the cops enough to not rat on you.
- Those who think they have The Power, in this case cops,feel a great frustration whenever their true vulnerability is exposed and generally respond by lashing out at the only visible target they have: the population.
- And you, of course. Guerrillas are never treated like soldiers by the enemy. The best you can do is make sure you never get caught.
- That all sucks big time, but remember that you can not stop the cops from being bastards and that whenever they lash out,you have an opportunity to support the population and show them why you’re doing the work that you’re doing.
- Guerrilla warfare can exhaust an enemy by driving up the costs to the point where they can no longer be paid for, but more often guerrillas have won because the enemy had revealed its own brutality and simultaneous vulnerability so blatantly that they lost all popular support.
Big enemies depend on the myths that they are (1) Just and (2) Invincible. When they are shown to be neither, resistance grows.
QueerAnarchism 