The Lake Effect Collective last mentioned the Chicago-area radicals at Behind Enemy Lines in our piece on the DNC, where they figured as a sort of foil to classify a problem we’d recognized in recent street movements. On the one hand, they were the public-facing representatives of militant, confrontational street tactics, no air quotes necessary. Insofar as they were enemies of the old, calcified left organizations, they were our friends, and we found ourselves around them often last summer. On the other, they were the organizers of a widely-publicized action outside the Israeli consulate, squarely in the ritzy, downtown Loop and, as a result, swarming with every type of local police officer available for overtime. Over seventy people were cuffed and processed, and the rest of the week suffered for it. In our
DNC reportback, we chose not to mince words when offering our judgment of this action:
Action at the level of affinity groups only stumbled into one success in breaking through the fences on Monday, and missed the chance to capitalize on this open window before it closed permanently. Tuesday’s attempt to force it back open at BEL’s march on the Israeli consulate was disastrous, ending with mass arrests and no tangible windfall for the movement.
A few weeks later, this brief statement earned a reply in BEL’s own report on the DNC, which they called “
The DNC is that way!” – quoting a phrase they’d shouted during Monday’s scuffle with the protest marshals, immediately prior to the fences coming down. They argue that the action at the consulate was a success, and that “the mass arrests were entirely worth it to send the message that some people won’t go along with the program.”
This invites a whole slew of thorny, partial disagreements: wasn’t it a fairly good message when people broke down those fences and pitched a bunch of Lacroix cans at CPD? And anyways, who’s listening? And so on. None of this really leads anywhere essential, and it’d amount to a petty argument, not a critical response. Instead of disagreeing point-by-point, then, it may be rewarding to approach this problem from another angle, in reference to what seems like the most personal disagreement between our collective and theirs – whether or not BEL is “politically vague,” as we argued in our DNC piece. BEL themselves have this to say:
[W]e think we can defend ourselves, at least, from the allegation of vaguery: we’re an anti-imperialist organization who believes in doing what must be done to stand with the people of the world against US empire. […] Our guess is that Lake Effect Collective has trouble making sense of an organization that doesn’t fit into the existing Left, and that’s why they find us “politically-vague.”
In fact, it’s because we don’t make much sense in terms of an old, moribund, activist left that we’ve chosen to spend so much time getting clear on what political thinking means right now, what tasks the movement seems to be setting itself, and the various ways we can contribute, here on the margins, to accomplishing them. We also believe in “doing what must be done,” but evidently, our groups disagree on what that entails. And we’re anti-imperialist, but scanning BEL’s own mission statement, one might come away believing that this is a question of foreign policy or individual moral wrongs done by this unraveling pig nation against the world’s poor. Jerry Rubin didn’t care much for talking strategy – ”If we had to decide beforehand what our goals would be, we’d be arguing about the future society for the next 1,000 years… The movement gets its unity around tactics. We become a community through collective action.” There’s a rational kernel there: why write this if we didn’t have an audience willing to listen, people in common struggle brought together around tactical questions, including BEL? But asking the questions all of this back-and-forth leaves unarticulated might put us closer to the core of the disagreement.
EVERYTHING IS FUCKED
Before we jump a level out into the structure of the situation, a few words on our position in it.
We are witnessing a political crisis with the potential for our enemies to effectively rewrite American common law. The legacy media has been quick to invoke a “constitutional crisis,” but the rule of law has not been suspended, and it won’t have to be. The mandate has passed from a transnationalizing capitalist class to a coalition of petty contenders to that throne. A downwardly-mobile white middle class, bereft of the social programs of the mid-20th century, has begun to retreat into the ideological mirage of earlier, simpler times that guaranteed the economic supremacy of the white race and a comfortable future for its children. Fantasies of frontier homesteading and self-sufficient patriarchal households release the pressure while the white race’s best and brightest get to work annihilating the last vestiges of an already-threadbare federal government. No one blinks when the President signs, then rescinds, a funding freeze to the corn subsidies and the SNAP program.
The electoral opposition isn’t any sharper. Right now, what characterizes the political situation is waiting: the Democrats, for obscure reasons, are fumbling their simplest image-laundering operation in decades; the rank-and-file liberals, severed from an ideologically-coherent leadership, are hanging in mid-air; the radicals and the largely-moribund activist left, in a more comforting and recognizable pattern, remain ineffective and largely inactive. There are sporadic signs of change, largely unnoticed on Musk and Zuckerberg’s social media platforms:
tens of thousands have taken expressways and
clashed with the police in the last week, mostly concentrated in the Southwest. Meanwhile, marches called by non-profits and old-guard left organizations are shuffling into the new Trump era.
In 2017, the “resistance” marched on the inauguration, and with strong, politically-coherent messages and mass appeal, it deftly subordinated its well-intentioned radical collaborators to its own aims. Meanwhile, the less-collaborationist, more-abstentionist radical layer of the movement was active elsewhere in DC: someone cold-clocked Richard Spencer, and a few hundred others laid waste to a dozen commercial storefronts, setting the tone for years of bitter street conflict to come. 2025 has been different. The liberal response to a mounting score of right-wing political malfeasance is confined to appearances in news media, where pundits discuss the precise number of people the Democratic Party could afford to sacrifice to attract Republican voters. Should they put John Fetterman on Rogan? Should Kamala have stood her ground on denying trans women gender affirming care? Honestly, who cares about those people anyways? – In the absence of credible solutions offered by the erstwhile ruling elite, otherwise-depoliticized people are devising their own. Some contenders: put Musk’s head on a pike, free Luigi, shut the country down until… In 2017, these aspirations would have terminated with a new, Democratic president. Not so easily today. The
New York Times can’t invoke institutional credibility fast enough to convince normal people that the total restructuring of the federal government will stop itself. (Something absent from the bourgeois press: the South saw scores of
voter suppression laws between 2020 and 2024. It stands to reckon they’ll only increase under the new Trump administration.) Liberals who still believe in the inviolability of liberalism can, at most, look away. Others have lapsed into “Blueanon” conspiracies about the dozen million votes the Democrats lost in 2024.
While 2017’s radical response was immediate and uncompromising, it also reflected a combination of greater political isolation with a greater amount of street-disciplined militants ready to converge on the Inauguration. This time around, instead of street militancy, the radicals’ first few weeks have emphasized base-building at the neighborhood level, a correct response to an unprecedented opening left by an exhausted, inactive Democratic party. (To this end, BEL’s decision to rent out a storefront organizing space during the DNC was laudable, and we’ve respected it since we heard about it in August!)
This election was a test of whether a “ruling class” exists in the United States. We learned, unequivocally, that the coalition of interests behind the Democratic party – an urban, college-educated middle class shoulder to shoulder with the bulk of the transnational capitalist class – was asleep at the wheel. The rule of law evidently means nothing with a Republican supreme court, and local jurisdictions are hardly much better. This new discovery points a layer deeper than Democratic ineptitude. What the bourgeois media has taken to calling a “constitutional crisis” is not actually about the integrity of the constitution – and it’s not even about the unspoken, unwritten rules of decorum on which the Democratic party once relied to shore up its cyclical returns to power.
In reality it reduces down to two things: first, the class character of the Trump administration, made up of nouveau-riche Silicon Valley elites, petty national capitals and landlords, some representatives, including the President, of the domestic FIRE sector, and the popular mandate of a non-college-educated white middle class. What the liberals have called a breakdown in decorum or a disregard for precedent is actually a class politics with different motives and representatives than theirs – for whom disorder is an opportunity to get ahead, not a threat to transnational firms’ bottom lines. (This is not abstract at all: see, for example, Vought’s recent confirmation.) Second, it is the reaction of the middle-class whites to a relative decline in their career prospects, usually hashed out as “downward mobility.” As expressed in “Opening Acts,” the so-called economic anxiety cited by many Trump voters has more to do with racial paranoia than the price of eggs – which is why calling them out on this or that hypocrisy falls so flat.
The Republican coalition of capitalist interests and the national-chauvinist white middle class will use every means at their disposal to remake America in the image of its founding myth: a utopia for the white race, at any cost to the world’s poor, at home or abroad. At least they’re honest.
CLASS PICTURES
We could use a little honesty ourselves. At the height of the Palestine solidarity movement, we expressed goals of broad proletarian and internationalist solidarity while struggling to take our solidarity movement out of the confines of the campus or the Palestinian diaspora. The problem of “escalation” hinged on this unresolved antagonism between the phrase (globalize the Intifada!) and its content (a student movement).
Escalation was two things simultaneously:
First: it was a possibility. We wanted to win divestment during the encampments, and only became more ambitious as the summer wore on. Globalizing the Intifada, abolishing the university, connecting our struggle to the struggle against the police, being practical internationalists and abolitionists, and bringing the war home were all sincere aspirations that many of us have held tight to over the past months. Escalation was a name for our subjective aspirations, and the more those ran up against the objective bedrock of the organization of society, the harder we pushed our uncompromising tactical line. We were right to do so.
Second: it was an index of a conflict between two blocs of the middle class. Each side took up a tactical commitment: negotiate or escalate.
The negotiators were invariably bureaucrats, management-minded full-time activists, children of academics, active employees of nonprofits (waged or not), social media influencers, etc. or their wilful collaborators, whether ideologically or by virtue of political underdevelopment – it bears repeating that the
division between the camp and “core”, while flimsier than we imagined,
was practically objective, and not because we radicals wanted it to be! The same gap between “core” and the rank-and-file emerged at every major encampment in the country: for example at Columbia in New York, at UArizona in Tucson, at all three encampments in Chicago, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and during the ULP strike in the California schools. The internal limit that we hit, long before the police arrived, was the self-activity of the professional-managerial middle class.
For its part, the Party of Escalation wasn’t all pure commitment and ethical fiber. For some people, the class suicide implied by escalation was a long-term wager on future success. But for most of the hard-line participants in the encampments, it was a gesture at a different kind of political life, to which the bureaucratic left organizations, the university administrations and the police were all equally hostile. It was not prefigurative – most of the subsistence goods we relied on to sleep on the university lawns were donated by sympathetic small businesses, and we never got close to the instruments of production and transport that feed, clothe and fuel this country – though it did give us a taste for what practical solidarity can feel like when we’re united by a strategic goal and not as respectful of the line between legality and illegality.
At its height during the last year, the Palestine movement, like the anti-war movement of the sixties and seventies, was an uneasy coalition between various middle-class forces. We’d like to get out ahead of the
question that eventually unmade the last revolutionary generation. How do we relate to broader and more objectively well-positioned class forces in American society, and across the globe?
RED-ROLE PSYCHOLOGY
Among the early responders to the new Trump administration there’s a lot of talk about neighborhood assemblies, base-building, reaching regular people, and raising popular consciousness against the American system. This is great, but its political content remains unclear. In particular: who are the people we want to become “conscious” in this moment? Everyone wants to capitalize on the millions of Democrats absent from the last election, but no one’s sure what they’re hoping to find.
For our part, many of our recent decisions have been underwritten by a hope to see a
dual power emerge in the United States, capable of confronting and defeating the forces of the state and domestic reaction, abolishing bourgeois property and law, and
immediately advancing proletarian self-abolition, or communism. This assumes some thorny concepts – who’s proletarian here? Is the proletariat identical with the working class? (Some of us, author included, think not.) Many of them are only beginning to be resolved. (What’s the role of the current, revolutionary minority in the social movements, and how do we relate to the more advanced segments of the class?) But they’re political questions we pose openly, without self-censorship or appeals to pre-given organizational unity.
Our emphasis on confrontational and ambitious tactics in our writings has always attempted to connect them back to their political context. We’ve found that in the case of certain street tactics, the technique in question converges with a whole strategic horizon that it implies and makes thinkable, clarifying the political situation for its participants. Beginning with the Ferguson uprising, for example, de-arresting began to enter popular consciousness, though at the margins of street activity in cities where confrontation with the police was most intense. After 2020, the entire situation changed, both on the level of tactics and strategy. During the George Floyd uprising, if you let people get arrested, you were a coward or a traitor. Mass confrontations with the police were initiated
and won by nameless, faceless proletarians, with only minimal help from street-disciplined, tactically-skilled protestors. And at this moment, the nonviolent, minimally-confrontational middle ground – mass arrests from Extinction Rebellion in 2019 or Jewish Voices for Peace in 2024 – fell away from the radical edge of the street movement. What was once the median range of street confrontation now looks like a meat grinder out of which well-meaning radicals expect to harvest a new crop of radicals who have learned to hate the police.
BEL claim their action outside the Israeli consulate sent the “most militant message of all of the protests.” This emphasis on militancy is laudable and sensitive to the leading edge of street tactics, but adopts the wrong disposition towards it. It mistakes one quality of the new tactical sensibility for its entirety. What matters is not just fighting the police, signaling discontent, causing a disturbance in a public space or even “shutting it down,” like the Yippies put it. The essential content is not disobeying orders, it’s disobeying orders and
getting away with it. At the University of Chicago encampment, on the night before we believed a raid was scheduled, groups of campers broke out into their “risk-level” roles – red roles would link arms and get arrested on camera, or would maybe defend the camp at penalty of a certain arrest, depending on who you asked, but at any rate, arrest was guaranteed. Yellow roles would leave as soon as the police advanced towards the camp. Green roles would watch from the sidelines, yell at the police, chant, etc. — But a fourth category invented itself, which didn’t easily fit into any of the preordained risk levels, since the others were mostly defensive in definition. One friend who would take on an “orange” role told me that she was looking to get better at staying as long as she could, doing as much as she could do, and knowing when to leave. Something nearly identical happened in
Tucson, AZ, in
Arcata, CA, during the
occupation of the Institute of Politics here in Chicago, when the fences came down at the DNC, and
later in Montreal. For our own part, the friends who’d later coalesce into an early version of this collective also wanted to train a certain muscle – being brave, but being smart about it. We overheard another conversation between someone who dissented at the encampment’s last general assembly and someone else from “core” who’d been convinced to support the defense of the camp. The organizer asked the camper whether they’d be interested in taking on a red role, which would get them arrested – camp defense, at this point, meant being one of the ten or twenty shield-users who’d try to hold off UCPD when they arrived for a raid. The camper paused for a moment, then clarified that they were interested in fighting because they wanted to win, not because they wanted to catch a case. Tactically, we’re here to push forward this kind of ambition, not just senseless and self-sacrificial bravery. Helping people learn that they can successfully undermine and circumvent the violence of the state is more important than teaching them what a baton feels like.
POLITICAL CLARITY (“DOING WHAT MUST BE DONE”)
If the de-arrest indexed the role of the police in maintaining American capitalism, in particular its color-line division of the working class between an affluent, mostly-white middle class, its poor-white collaborators, and a racialized, urban proletariat, what does this new notion of
getting away with it teach us?
Most importantly, it forces us to take the reflective, self-clarifying moment of “spontaneous” uprisings seriously. Regular people approach street confrontations not just out of the moral fiber of their character, or their indignation at the state of the world – they want to learn how to rebel
effectively. Any attempt to “go to the masses” should take this questioning attitude seriously, not just by spreading radical techniques, but by substantiating them with concrete, serious political education.
What do we mean by that? BEL says in their “
Mission Statement” that, “through popular education (not just memes or slogans), we will break through the complicity, government lies, and media silence and expose the crimes of the war machine, celebrating resistance and building public opinion against ongoing and future wars.” This is agreeable, but it’s a little one-sided: people learn to answer the questions they have, which aren’t always the ones we intellectuals want to teach them. An example: the group’s mission “to find the conscious and critical thinkers” among “active-duty soldiers and their families” is righteous but wrongheaded. One fact that distinguishes our moment from the heyday of the anti-Vietnam protests is the structure and class character of the military. After the draft pulled in enough poor whites and non-white proletarians to jeopardize the Vietnam war at home and abroad, it was
replaced by a cultural campaign to raise a professional, middle-class military in which, at present, the great majority of recruits are descended from middle-class military parents. The “poverty draft” is a myth that ironically reflects a failed government campaign more than the reality of the US military.
Taking a step back from America’s middle-class professional military and its families, we can see in a little more clarity the lines along which this new cycle of class struggle is taking shape. As mentioned in “Opening Acts,” the American working class, in its unconscious self-activity and its political self-understanding, is defined by the color line. This is not an ideological accretion that distorts the essential identity of white and Black workers, but instead names a racial division of labor that extends down from hiring and firing practices and wage differentials into the geographic organization of cities and the biopolitical distribution of who is exposed to senseless death and immiseration, and who’s not. When Sean O’Brien complains about “illegals,” he’s not only being stupid and irrational – he is appealing to the legal distinction between documented and undocumented laborers that greatly lowers the aggregate cost of reproduction of the latter (lower wages, less overhead for safe working conditions, often heavily restricted freedom of movement) and sets undocumented workers against documented ones. When we look at claims of “job theft” a little closer, it’s not hard to see the same mechanism that DuBois saw, in the nineteenth century, guaranteed Northern labor “could not clearly envisage just how slave labor in conjunction and competition with free labor tended to reduce all labor toward slavery.” (BR p. 19) The same legal mechanism that allows documented workers to reap the benefits of documentation and citizenship pits them against their undocumented pseudo-competitors and leverages that objective division to keep the American working class unorganized and subordinate to the business unions. This is the real content of the relation: it’s not a hypocrisy that Sean O’Brien’s union employees wouldn’t work in meatpacking. That’s the point. And as a result, to blame this on insufficient overtures to the white left would
completely mischaracterize the situation.
This sketch of American labor doesn’t offer up any easy answers or readymade political solutions on either side of the color line – misery doesn’t mechanically produce political clarity – and if anything, it complicates the politics of various fragments of the class. But if we want to compose a political force capable of articulating its own revolutionary goals and making good on them, we’ll have to understand the terrain on which those coalitions and common practical agreements take shape. For example, this makes intervention in the state-endorsed distinction between innocent and criminal migrants essential–including its many soft-pedaled liberal versions. It also challenges us to understand why the encampments failed to bridge student radicalism and the popular forces with the leverage necessary to unmake this society. As a sixties Panther
put it: “I believe working people are the blade of the revolution and the students the handle. No matter how hard the thrust is, the action will be useless unless the blade is sharp.” A Hind’s Hall occupier
describes a familiar scene: “A Barnard grad made an announcement that we needed to break open the gates and let all of Harlem inside, she was promptly recruited.” We all wanted to break down the walls that segregated the university from the regular people who live next door to it – not least of all in Hyde Park. But overtures in this direction fell flat, both subjectively and objectively. How do we engineer a situation in which our own activity supports and advances the radical elements of the class that are emerging in this crisis situation?
The rudimentary components of the problem and its solution are there in BEL’s statement of purpose. All of the “anti-war activists, courageous religious people of conscience, Rastas, punk rock kids, Palestinian activists, diaspora rebels, and people fighting for national liberation for their homelands and/or people” will need to make felt contact with “immigrants and refugees who have firsthand experience with the horrors of the empire; Black, Latino, Indigenous, poor, and working-class high school students,” and everyone else whose objective position in the international system renders them an advanced segment of the class. But none of this can include giving up the political commitments that distinguish us from the nonprofits and decaying left organizations, chief among them autonomous politics and revolutionary aspirations.
This is why we thought BEL’s action at the Israeli consulate was misguided in its aims and disastrous in its effects. Unlike Jerry Rubin, we don’t think “Revolution is Theater-in-the-Streets” wherein “[t]he goal is to turn on everyone who can be turned on and turn off everybody else.” Measuring our impact in media attention or brute numbers is inessential; it tries to read success and failure off of a barometer we inherit from activists and nonprofits, who judge themselves by the speed with which they drag mass movements back into the morass of symbolic consciousness-raising. Mass arrests were guaranteed in advance when BEL picked their fight in the least hospitable, most surveilled neighborhood of Chicago, surrounded by hundreds of riot cops. But successful actions do not just “send a message” by disobeying, they
teach people, onlookers or participants, that they can do more than just struggle: they can win, too.
