If you’re new to actions with an arrest risk and you don’t have experienced protestors with you, there’s stuff you can find online about having a legal team, writing the name of a lawyer on your body, saying NOTHING to the cops except the name of your lawyer, etc. That’s all good advice.
But let me give you a bit of advice that is just as essential as all that:
If one of your comrades gets arrested, and you know they can be held for 6, 9, 12 hours, depending on where you are, you get a group of people together and you wait outside the police station.
You may be tired, you may be stressed, it may be freezing, you may need to take turns, but you take whoever can still physically and mentally bear it and you go to that police station and you wait for your comrade. You can spend the time taking care of each other, drinking hot drinks, doing whatever gets you through, but you wait.
And when your comrade gets out, you make sure they do not walk home alone in the dark thinking about the fucked up experience they just had, you make sure there’s a big fucking crowd of their comrades there to greet them with hugs and hot drinks and a cigarette if they smoke.
And whether the arrested comrade that just got out is happy or sad or pissed off, you take that for what it is and give that space and you support that. And you get them a hot meal and you hang out with them and you offer to let them stay at your place or you stay with them so they don’t have to spend that night alone with their thoughts.
You do this every damn time, regardless of whether you really like that comrade and regardless of how you feel about the thing your comrade got arrested for, regardless of how often they’ve been arrested. Because you never know how shitty their experience is going to be in there this time.
Trust me. This is absolutely essential. Once you’ve been arrested and have felt the difference between walking home alone or having your friends waiting for you, you’ll understand.
Be good comrades
If you can always be at Jail Support. It’s honestly a Great time, it’s a nice show of solidarity, and like one of the last time I did. I got to smoke a blunt with a Black Panther, and we had a good half hour or so of just chatting with em about like American history and it was great!
So like do it! You never know what comrades you’ll meet
True, these really are the moments where you meet the best comrades. The ones that know what it’s really about. The colder and longer the wait, the more it says about the comrades you’ll find there.
(Without ignoring that sitting in the cold is not something everyone can do. I see you awesome comrades with chronic illness and other health stuff. I know how dedicated you are just being in these actions at all.)
((and its also ok if you cant do this all the time, even without having health problem. thats why a group is useful ; when youre too tired, someone else can take your place))
Absolutely.
But to those people that will hitchhike for 16 hours in december yet are always too tired and too cold when a comrade is in jail: I see you too.
I’ve got you on the same mental list as people who only show up for an action if they know it’s going to be big and newsworthy. Fucking useless.
True. Ultimately i trust people to know when their tiredness is feigned and when resting means they wont burn themselves : your conscience will catch you up lmao
Well, I’ll be honest, I do watch how people behave in these situations to decide who I want to spend more time with as an activist or a friend. Because with this sort of high-stress and dangerous activism, we all need far more support than just the team that welcomes us outside the police station. And I wish I could trust my comrades to provide that but often they don’t.
Anarchists and antifascists have a massive burn-out rate because the shit we do is dangerous and stressful and we keep doing it beyond our limits because it matters so much.
So as a matter of sustainable activism and my own personal health, I work with activists that care for each other, that prioritize helping each other through shit. Whether someone is willing to help me through a 4 AM breakdown when they’re not really in the mood is a way more important fact about them than whether they’ve got the best radical politics or the coolest action record.
Of course it is not in the simple ‘whoever has the most energy is the most committed’ sort of way, that would be totally ableist and wouldn’t reach my actual goals of finding the people that give a shit.
But I do look at ‘how much energy someone puts into the cool, the flashy, the fun, the things that get them scene creds’, versus ‘how much energy someone puts into care, fixing shit, activist space clean up and boring work that they’ll never get credits for.
(While absolutely avoiding those people who think doing care as activism makes them morally superior to ‘violent’ activists. I don’t fuck with non-violence-preaching shits that aren’t going to have my back when something that is destroying us needs to be destroyed).
I don’t think it’s a matter of conscience either. I think most of us learn at some point inn our activism that helping each other through the hard times matters. And we don’t learn it through guilt, we learn it through break downs, or through the times we lost friends because we never had time for their break downs.
And if someone wants to learn how to stop burning themselves out and losing their friends? Hey, I’m here to help. But until then, I’m not gonna put my energy and emotions into close friendships or affinity groups with people who are not gonna be there for me when I need it the most because there is a cool action or a concert somewhere that they’re rather be at.
ah yess thats totally true ! in many anarchists/antifascist groups there is this prevalence of hyper-virility, whith a race of who will have done the most dangerous/noticeable thing (also often a gender division of labor, for example during a meeting women will take care of refugees/will translate info to them while men are talking in the center about class struggle…). You can count on them to beat some fascists, they will be all too happy to compare their ‘medals’, but for all the rest ? duh, its not ‘fun’. well yea its not fun you dipshit, to make food for your trans activist friend who was beaten up in a bar once again this week and whos just crying and repeating the same thing again and again.
thats why i stay away from this sort of group and only go for queer anarchist group who are much more about safe place and all. A lot of our work consist in creating non-mixed place (for queer or women or trans depending on the event) in concerts or parties and well there are things more fun that to do the vigil at the entrance lmao but at least everything is considered seriously, not just the protests or riots. Oc you see the same things you’re talking about, aka people going towards the actions that ‘shine’ more brilliantly but imo its less pronounced.
But a question that i find difficult (yea im slowly deriving from the topic lol) is precisely friendship in militant groups. I personally find it very difficult navigating in relationships in this sort of collective. Are they my friend ? are they my colleagues ? how many attentions are too much ? how much close relationships disturbs the group ? I know that my mental disorders make this even more difficult because i find social codes very disturbing, and my paranoia and fear of being ‘too much’ put too many things at stake with every interaction i have. But its a theme i hear smtms so i know its not only me lol. Like when i start to be very comfortable i find in natural to confide in each other or to make some jokes about the love life of a ‘comrade’ (more like benevolent winks), and most of the times its okay but then x person tell me its not my business. And its like a cold shower and i dont dare to be interested in the life of my comrades outside activism anymore. And like isnt it strange, hypocrite, to make food for someone who just went out of custody for the first time, while i dont even know what is their favorite color and wont dare to ask them ?? at least when i go to protest or riots i know that my presence is welcome because we are never enough ; when its for being just present to someone who isnt doing great, i never know if my presence is a bother to them.
And its the same thing for other situations : when i disagree with a comrade on a political subject i consider sort-of-a-friend, its very hard to distinguish what is about politics and what is about friendship. If we are not on the same page on idk the nuclearization of iran, are we still good buddies ? for me oc because well its not a subject i have lot of hot feelings about, but maybe not for the other person, so im ill-at-ease and dont really know how to act with this person after. Am i still an ok person to go console them when times arent so good for them, or should i let someone else go ?
Im going to stop here lmao but thats just to say that…its difficult. Now (its especially true now that my depression hits really hard) i avoid situations with lot of human interactions in my activist group, and only go to protest or ‘big things’. Not because i find it more symbolically favorable (hell at this point there are so many new persons in my collective that i doubt my face ring a bell for many people), but just because i know i wont be a bother there. Which i know kind of sucks buut well.
How do you know how to ‘take care’ in an activist group ? Do you have discussions about that in your collective ? In mine its perceived as like something natural, so there arent really committee (we have consent committee, survivors committee, violent action committee, organization of protest committee, depending of the needs of the moment and how quick we have to be to take a decision) about it, and im not bold enough to talk about it coz well i fear that once again i will be like the strange one who dont have a clue on social interaction lmao. And i feel like im not the only on whos slowly drifting away because of this sort of thing, but since im a lot less present i dont feel im someone legitimate enough to ask for a change.
sorry for the long post lmaoooo
I like your long post. Thank you for all that.
Some of my experiences are similar, some are different. I’m not personally in a structured collective with committees. My activism revolves
around a local ‘scene’ where anarchists meet at the same
squats, parties, vegan kitchens, etc and form action groups based on
need, which fall apart again when they no longer serve their purpose.
For me, forming close friendships with other anarchists is absolutely essential. Friends are such an important part of my emotional support system and when I have had a stressful action I need to talk to friends that get it. I don’t think I could talk about my last experience with police brutality with a friend who doesn’t hate cops. And I don’t think a non-anarchist friend would accept “So I got arrested, I can’t tell you what for, but I wanna talk about how shitty the arrest was.” and totally go along with that without questioning it.
So a significant number of my close friends are anarchists, I often date other anarchists and I often have a close friend or a partner as my action-buddy.
This seems to be more-or-less the norm in my local scene. Through our connection of ‘people we do actions with’ runs a network of intense and less intense friendships and relationships. There is occasional drama when friends fight or when relationships break up, but I feel like we are also kinder to each other because we’re all either friends or friends-of-friends.
That doesn’t mean we’re all constantly caring for each other though. You still have friends and friends-of-friends that are only there for you when it’s effortless and that will suddenly drop out when you need it the most. And a lot of people think that ‘going for a drink together’ after an action is all the support people need and they don’t really see the point of really talking about vulnerability and mental health.
I choose to form the closest friendships with the people who are really there for me and who do prioritize care. Although I only really know that for sure once things get rough.
I think the amount of friendship in our activism makes us stronger. It’s definitely worth the occasional drama that it brings. But friendship isn’t enough. We still need to organize and cultivate an activist culture where ‘don’t let someone walk home alone after they were arrested’ is as obvious as ‘don’t talk to cops’ and where planning a Support & Recovery team for an action is as obvious as planing a Legal team, and so on. Just like we need a Security culture, we need a Support culture that keeps us going.
QueerAnarchism 