Why is this solarpunk? Because changing society takes people power. Because protests change nations. Because for the last decade protests inspired by democratic anarchist principles have sprung up in nation after nation, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. And the after action report of the first two decades of the 21st century shows not just how anarchist-inspired protests began but how they fail - and who takes advantage of that failure.
This article is long, complex, and hard to read. Emotionally hard. It holds some truths that are hard for punks and anarchists to hear.
And if your activism is more than just posting online it may be the most important article you read this year.
I think the underlying issue is that there are different strategic requirements for general collective decision-making, on the one hand, and for outmaneuvering hostile institutions (media, police, etc.) on the other. Horizontalism may work all right for the first, but it’s too predictable and consistent for the second. Because institutions are adaptive, and once they can predict you, they can exploit you. A hierarchical organization with a small leadership can adapt more quickly, but then the bulk of the movement has no agency and the only way to maintain their commitment is through a cult of personality.
I was involved in some of the decade’s horizontalist protest movements, and the events in my city had some parallels to what they describe happening in São Paulo (albeit on a smaller scale): a brutal police response to an initial protest that got widespread media coverage, followed by a much larger protest whose participants weren’t necessarily ideologically aligned with the original one. And while it was ultimately no more successful, they did do one smart thing at first that doesn’t seem to have happened in Brazil: they immediately pulled all the newcomers into a democratic assembly to decide on the next course of action. The newcomers greatly outnumbered the original group, so the original group was giving up control and doubtless compromising some of their original goals. But in return, the newcomers became invested in the process, and that prevented the movement from getting hijacked by external groups as happened in Brazil and Ukraine.
We still had issues of predictability, which eventually let hostile groups spin their own narratives and otherwise outmaneuver us; and we gradually fell apart out of frustration with our inability to counter them. But I’m not convinced that centralized leadership would have been the only solution.