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The setting: a dinner table, after eating together, in a shared house dedicated to the struggle. Many people from out of town stay on the floors or couches for a few days or weeks at a time. Candles and flowers and bottles of wine create a small oasis of calm amidst the ups and downs of the movement. We all just got news that police raided the forest and erected barriers around Weelaunee People’s Park.
Q: This is your conversation, we can talk about whatever you all want. But we’re hoping that at some point tonight, we can hear about life in the forest, and about what brought you here to Atlanta and to participate in this struggle.
But to start us off, can you talk about the political or cultural reference points that led each of you to end up here? From your own life experience, historical context, subcultures…
Bushel: My first personal reference point was Occupy. But, I actually largely missed that and was out of the country during that time. Afterwards, over the next several years I was involved in probably five different pipeline struggles, as well as protests around Ferguson. And then, Standing Rock was a very important reference point for me, and definitely informed how I think about land defense and things in the forest here. In terms of reference points outside my own experience, I’ve also been really influenced by a lot of land-based, peasant and indigenous-led struggles in Central and South America. Things like the uprisings in Bolivia over the last couple decades, and Movimento Sem Terra and things like that. I have balanced a lot of the oppositional stuff that I do with working on farming and land-based stuff, so those things are intertwined for me, and that plays out a lot in my analysis of the forest. The last thing I’ll say that’s been a big part of my development has been migrant solidarity struggles on both sides of the border; solidarity work with the migrant caravans showing up in Tijuana and other places.
I guess I’ll also say that the most important reference point feels like the [George Floyd] Uprising, obviously. Very much what’s happening in Atlanta feels like a continuation of the Uprising. Atlanta, in addition to Minneapolis and a couple other places, are the places where the Uprising has really stayed alive and the torches remain lit.
שְׁכִינָה: Totally. There are these reference points like Standing Rock, or like the ZAD. It’s really dangerous to make those reference points, they’re just different enough that you can’t necessarily understand this struggle based on that, and people import these ideological conflicts that really don’t fly here because they’re from different enough of a situation. But, it feels like there are a lot of examples, observations you could make about how things went down in 2020, and how things played out that are directly applicable here, like social dynamics and strategy.
612: I guess I’ll say something about my trajectory and how I got here. I wasn’t always interested in politics growing up. I was pretty apolitical. It just wasn’t on my radar. Occupy happened, when I went to some protests in Baltimore. Those were some of the first protests I ever went to. Then I started getting more interested in politics and the world around me, and started reading anarchist theory at some point, and started to really identify with what I was reading in that literature. It was putting words and terms to feelings and ways that I’ve always been. And then at the time of Occupy ICE, in the city that I was living in there was a two-month protest camp. That was the first time I had ever seen a protest camp. I think that was 2018? I spent a little bit of time there, I didn’t camp, but I did visit there often. And then the Uprising happened, and during that time I had met someone that I started dating for a while, and they were an old-school Northwest tree sitter and lifelong activist. They were at Ferguson, Standing Rock and all these places. And I heard their stories, they told me everything they did with their life, and it just sounded so interesting. I had never done any forest defense before I came out here, but I have spent a lot of time in forests and in nature. And this struggle here in Atlanta seemed really interesting because it’s the intersection between anti-police struggle and forest defense. This intersection between the two is kind of unique, I feel. I don’t know if we’ve really seen anything like this before. So I came out here when I could, which was the end of last year. I spent three weeks here and fell in love with the people I met here, and the forest.
Part of my background is also in antifascist organizing and counter-protesting in the Northwest. Soon after Trump took office, these groups started popping up, like Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and the white supremacists started feeling more emboldened to come out and so. That was kind of my start to on-the-ground activist stuff.
Q: As other people from the Northwest, I’ll just say that it’s really nice to be here and to feel like no one is concerned about fascists. I mean there’s police fascists, but there’s such a baseline level of paranoia around armed militias in the Northwest that has been so heightened…It’s just so funny to see that, because there’s so much state repression here, but people are so chill and less paranoid than most people in the Northwest most of the time, where there’s much less active repression, but there’s these extra-state actors.
612: Totally. Yeah I feel like if the same struggle was happening somewhere in the Northwest, it would be much more at risk of a three-way fight going on where we’d be seeing IEDs in the forest placed by militia-types and chuds, and drive-by paint balling or whatever, maybe worse.
Bushel: My understanding just from Atlanta is that the white supremacist rightwing is pretty scared to come here because of how powerful Black power is in Atlanta in different ways. There are a few exceptions to that: in 2020, white supremacists attacked the Wendy’s, but, again that just seemed at a dramatically lower scale than in other places. I would want to hear more from people who were actually around for that, but I think it might also have to do a little with the last time the rightwing tried to have a big mobilization at Stone Mountain, which was very successfully shut down.
שְׁכִינָה: It’s so nice hearing these stories about where everyone is coming from.
“We had read about Cop City, knew about the rave, and somehow our bodies were just telling us that we needed to be here, it felt extremely important for us to be here.”
: I found out about Stop Cop City through my radical reading group. We had just read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, and we were pretty stoked about alternative ways of living described in it and some of the ideas of what’s possible that came out from reading that as a group. Then a friend of mine asked if I wanted to go to a rave in Atlanta, and I was like, cool that sounds sick… I had never done any forest defense before that. Just some Black Lives Matter protests. And then we went to the rave really not having very much context, and it was so crazy! A friend of mine who came with me, we both shared the experience of not really knowing why we needed to go. We had read about Cop City, knew about the rave, and somehow our bodies were just telling us that we needed to be here, it felt extremely important for us to be here. There was intense anticipation and excitement over something that we just really didn’t know anything about. And then when we got into the forest, we were walking there together, we both had the experience of being like, “Fuck yeah! Yes! Yes! We’re here!” And then, meeting people, and seeing how things were going down, and looking at the way people were living, gave us the analytical reasons why. The intellectual explanation of what we somehow knew ahead of time. Very strange.
Q: I had a very similar experience in my body.
: Really?! We have to be here!
Bushel: Yeah, I had that same exact experience. I remember having a conversation with Tortugita within a week of them arriving, and they described the same thing. They knew that this was where they needed to be.
שְׁכִינָה: A couple starting points for me: I was first getting more activated around radical politics during the 2014 Ferguson riots. And also learning about the history of environmental sabotage, shit like the Monkey Wrench Gang and the deep history of that–that it had been going on for a long time, and not just by a tiny, militant subculture, but by a decent number of people. That was really eye-opening to me at the time, because it introduced a more direct line of engagement with the world. Obviously, people putting their life on the line in Ferguson raised the stakes of what I felt was possible. Like, the degree of engagement that I felt responsible for. I was like, if they’re doing this, then it’s important that they’re not the only ones. Also the prison strikes by the Free Alabama movement, I think it was in 2016 and 2019. I knew how fucked up prisons were for a long time, but it was different having that sort of antagonism present that drew such a direct line to the brutality of slavery. Not just the brutality of slavery, but also the ways at hand to defeat slavery at the time and are still relevant now. It’s really inspiring to see people taking such clear action with such a clear intervention point. And then Standing Rock was very beautiful. I think I’m a little too attached to Standing Rock. I spent a long time trying to salvage the potential that Standing Rock promised and then didn’t fully deliver.
B: I’ll briefly say: I’ve had a much shorter path, I’m much younger and newer to things. But I got involved doing things in the Mountain Valley Pipeline struggle. The culture around that very much formed how I approach things, and was my direct line to here.
Mote: I also vibe with that. My path was mostly through anti-pipeline campaigns, especially one in particular. The people that mentored me were old Earth First!-er types, and so I understand my place in the movement as being the latest person that’s part of this whole Earth First! thing that goes back several decades, and now sort of questionably exists even at all. That’s how I got into things all the way, and that’s definitely how I ended up here.
Q: This is a really good segue into talking about land defense, and specifically the land defense in the forest. I live in the woods, though in a really different way, and I also come from a context that is extremely inspired by land defense. So I have a lot of questions about how Atlanta is doing this because it’s so different than any of my own reference points. I’ve never seen this before, this urban eco-defense. And for some people in this struggle, it seems like the eco-defense part is a way to talk about police, which of course is really important. We can talk about intersections, but the more I see it the more I can’t even see a crossroads, they just can’t actually be separated. It’s totally enmeshed and the same fucking thing. Which is so beautiful. So that’s not a question, but I just want to articulate that.
From afar, I heard that there was old growth in the Weelaunee Forest. And then I heard the state narrative is that, “no it’s only invasive species.” And then, I heard people here say “I love our trash forest!” So I just want to ask, on your own terms, about your relationship to the forest. Or, how your relationship to the forest started and changed over time throughout the movement and through being here?
“We actually need every little bit of tree cover and photosynthetic living material–including the kudzu–that we can get in the city to sequester carbon and prevent erosion and prevent flooding. And also we need it to just be alive, and to feed us in those other ways.”
Bushel: I really love our trash forest. I am personally very inspired by understandings of ecology and the anthropocene, and “contamination”—the word Ana Tsing uses in The Mushroom at the End of the World. The ecosystem of the Weelaunee Forest includes the people who can’t afford the dump fees and the hour-long wait at the dump, and so they come and they dump their trash in the forest. They are part of the forest ecosystem. The forest is full of trash. People have dumped trash there for so long. Intrenchment Creek is full of trash and full of all these contaminants, and it’s full of sewage because the overflow system in Atlanta, whenever more than one tenth of an inch of rain occurs, they just put all the shit into the overflow drains and it goes into places like Intrenchment Creek.
Obviously, we see a vision for the forest in the future when all of those things can hopefully be healed and remediated and addressed. But, we want to defend the trash forest. We want to defend the invasive species. I understand that there’s this idea that we only want to protect the old growth, this bureaucratizing of conservation. For the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, when they clearcut everything in a 165-mile line to make this pipeline, some of the environmental liberal NGOs made a deal to save the old growth, and it saved one tree. It saved one cypress tree that was technically decided to be old enough. And the pipeline company wrapped all this colored tape around it to make sure it didn’t get cut down, and they made this big thing about how they were saving the old growth. And, it’s entirely possible that that tree is going to be shocked by the total deforestation that occurred to all the other trees around it. And because of all the soil that’s going to get washed away through that process, trees are not going to get newly established there anymore. And so yeah, there’s a few old growth trees in the Weelaunee Forest, but if those are the only ones we’re trying to save then…
We actually need every little bit of tree cover and photosynthetic living material–including the kudzu–that we can get in the city to sequester carbon and prevent erosion and prevent flooding. And also we need it to just be alive, and to feed us in those other ways. They provide us with the feeling of being able to be part of an ecosystem.
Rutabaga: I really agree with a lot of that. I had never been to Atlanta before hearing about this movement, and I really vibe with what you were saying earlier about the way that this defense is really different because it’s a scrawny, baby forest. But, after living there for a period of time, and seeing that this land has been disturbed really recently, it’s obvious, it shows… There’s the pine stands, everything is young. But it’s so alive. It’s so very alive there, and there’s so much there. There’s salamanders and newts and owls, and opossums, raccoons, and these are just the animals I’ve personally seen and experienced community with! There was a turtle that must have lived nearby because it crossed my tent path every morning, we knew each other. So, young forests are just as important as old forests. We need to let the earth be, it is healing itself. All of these things are working together to heal it. Maybe it’s full of privet and wisteria, but those things are holding the forest down. And, if that forest didn’t exist, shit would be so much more flooded. Did you see how flooded the roads are today after three days of rain? It’s already so bad.
Living there and being with all of these creatures in community… During the recent Week of Action we were there in celebration and in defense of the land. At one point, we were partying because there was this crazy chaos wedding where people decided they were going to marry the people to the forest. And someone said to me, “This is the first time in hundreds of years that this land has not been a site of pure suffering.” From colonization to slavery to the prison farm. Now, the forest has rested, and has the potential to be a place where people join to celebrate and build community.
“The forest has been really really damaged by its history, and people have been really really damaged by their histories. But, anarchism is not a belief that it’s going to be this utopia or that things are going to be perfect. It’s a belief in orienting ourselves better towards a world where we can heal ourselves. And where the forest can heal itself. We are able to heal ourselves, and it happens a lot faster than you’d think..“
Y: Can I jump off of that? Not to get too mushy, but when people are like, “Oh this is new growth, this is a trash forest”, and make the whole argument about old growth, it reminds me a lot of when people say, “Well, anarchism is never going to work because people are so screwed up.” And it’s like, well yeah the forest has been really really damaged by its history, and people have been really really damaged by their histories. But, anarchism, or belief in this struggle, is not a belief that it’s going to be this utopia or that things are going to be perfect. It’s a belief in orienting ourselves better towards a world where we can heal ourselves. And where the forest can heal itself. We are able to heal ourselves, and it happens a lot faster than you’d think. And I think that we got to see that here a little bit. I think that’s so much what you’re talking about, like how quickly it comes back and how there’s an ecology there, and also how much, when people get these tiny little spaces that are, in certain ways, outside of their relationship with capitalism, how much that changes them, and how much they’re willing to fight for that.
Q: Hell yeah. You all are totally making me cry.
Rutabaga: I spent some time in the woods, sitting and reflecting about the history of domination in this country, and it’s extremely significant that killing the forest is like killing the people. The whole master-slave relationship of “man over nature”: it’s power incarnate, the way they’re trying to build a police militarization center, here where organically things are growing and healing. So, I feel like it’s so enmeshed for me, that abolition means freeing, rewilding, decolonizing, letting go of the structures of power that have played out here in history.
“Everywhere that we are trying to stop the destruction of the earth, it is the police who are there stopping us from stopping it. And if we are going to succeed and survive, the first thing we have to do is destroy the police.
Bushel: That reminds me, another big influence on me in this struggle is lessons of the Black vitalist current, represented by the MOVE family. They weren’t even talking about capitalism and anti-capitalism, but just really framing things as a life and anti-life struggle. They were doing that a long time ago, really ahead of the curve on a lot of that stuff. I think that’s been very animating of the struggle here, because it speaks to the truth that it’s not even an intersection of different struggles. It is just true that everywhere that we are trying to stop the destruction of the earth, it is the police who are there stopping us from stopping it. And if we are going to succeed and survive, the first thing we have to do is destroy the police.
שְׁכִינָה: At the end of the day that’s my reason for being here. If the police were gone tomorrow, people would just go and stop the machines that are destroying the earth. In a matter of weeks.
Mote: We would simply win.
Y: They have so much on their side, but they’re still not that good at stopping us, you know?
<laughter>
I mean it’s like jeez they have access to so much more money and technology…
שְׁכִינָה: Yeah, if anything, they’ve come across as incompetent throughout the course of this.
Bushel: 100%. One of the biggest things I’ve learned in other struggles that I’ve really tried to share with newer folks here is that, ninety-nine percent of the time, our tendency is to over-estimate the intelligence of the police and the state. And sure, the one percent of the time that we underestimate them, they fuck us up really bad, but it’s definitely not the norm. And it certainly hasn’t been in this struggle. Their learning curve has been shockingly, stupidly, slow on so many things. They’re just really reliant on certain types of brute force that they have access to. But a lot of times when they are bringing those things to bear, it is ultimately just strengthening the movement.
שְׁכִינָה: Yeah they’re extremely complacent as an institution. This struggle caught them extremely by surprise, in terms of how potent it’s been.
Q: You say they have all the money and technology, and yet you also have all these things they can’t imagine: making meaning and connection together and sharing daily life. They also seem completely captured by their own sense of time: I heard that the forest was declared closed when I arrived here at the end of last week, but they waited to officially close it until the beginning of the work week on the next Monday. The movement is on a different rhythm; there aren’t “work weeks” and “weekends,” which I think speaks to these totally incompatible visions of the world.
One of the lovely things being here is witnessing the baseline level of sharing, which makes being able to exist with a certain distance from the economy possible, so you can do other things with your time. Can you talk about the practices, habits and relations that allow you to be here doing this and going so hard?
Rutabaga: One thing is that in pretty much every communal space, there’s free food, which is really incredible and important. Atlanta is the most food-generous, mutual aid kind of space. People are sharing food everywhere constantly. It’s wonderful.
Bushel: For me, existing in Atlanta is definitely made possible by this sense of a communal way of life, or a commune, that people here have been investing time in prior to this struggle. But, so many more people have come into connection with that through this struggle. There’s really good free grocery infrastructure, and that’s complimented by this general sense that any house I go to, I can expect that all the food is open to be shared with anybody who’s there. People who have food stamps or assistance to get food are freely sharing that with everybody. When we had a camp in the forest, a lot of people put in effort to get, not just the essentials, but also nice things like chocolate, coffee, and candy, by any means necessary, and bring them to share in the camp kitchen for everybody.
שְׁכִינָה: People in the woods have eaten pretty well through the course of this. A lot of people have come to the woods because people just bring them infinite free food, every day. Sometimes it’s even prepared. There’s just a huge machine feeding this, and that’s been really essential. To expand on food, too, all kinds of domesticity have been vital to me feeling ok when I’ve been in Atlanta, and something I’ve really focused on even when I’ve been living in the woods. I try to make it feel nourishing. Whether that’s keeping everything organized and clean, or making sure people have what they need to take care of their health. It’s the sort of work that can go unnoticed, except when it’s not there and you’re miserable.
Rutabaga: People who have been raised in a capitalist system have all kinds of baggage around labor, so, I wouldn’t say all the labor gets done in a super egalitarian way all the time. But I think that it is done, usually, in a pretty honest way, which is cool, and a step in the direction of how to be fair. In the woods, there is space to rest. I don’t think it would be possible for people to exist in a communal way without having tension about how work is getting done, especially the domestic work. Everyone here is queer and has different gender baggage going on, too, so I think that the way that things go is not always perfect but I do feel like there has been a decent culture of not forcing labor onto people who don’t want to be doing it, or making people take on amounts of work that are too much, but that they choose to do.
Mote: For me, part of the answer is disappointingly that it’s kind of difficult to be here. The food situation is extremely figured out thanks to long-term organizing that’s been happening here for a long time, and also food stamps. So that solves a problem for me. But, otherwise I often find that I spend resources to be here to a certain extent, and it’s kind of difficult. It just is what it is. I think there’s some things that we could do better at, and I think there’s some things we do really well. Government benefits in Georgia are garbage. My benefits are better, though out-of-state, so if I want to go to the doctor, I have to drive 500-1,000 miles. That’s the only option, because other places want cash up-front. This makes being here difficult. And also, just not having income. Everything just fucking costs money.
Bushel: That brings me to something I was thinking earlier. It’s true that me being here is really facilitated by the good food infrastructure, and the level of communal housing. Another thing that allows me to be here is that, during the Uprising, I was physically and financially in a position where it was very difficult to participate. I was living like 1,000 miles away from anywhere where anything interesting was happening, and I didn’t have a working vehicle, and I had all these other financial limitations.
So, I really oriented myself over the following two years towards trying to be more prepared the next time I wanted to be someplace. I feel lucky that I’ve been able to lay some of that groundwork, and I can be here, and I have the support to do that. One thing that I’ve noticed, also, is that there’s a certain element of the communal life here that involves not just people sharing food or housing, but also actually collaborating on earning money in different ways. People get in on different hustles together. Selling blood plasma, exploiting weird loopholes to make $1,000…or other things that I don’t need to mention.
One thing that’s really exciting to me, and something that I’ve tried to cultivate fully apart from the struggle, from my life elsewhere, is this sense of teaming up. Not just for the reproductive labor side of things, but for our interactions with the market: where we’re actually going to get our fucking money, and the ways we can be smarter and more effective by doing that together. That has been cool to see.
Q: Last week, Dekalb County declared the park closed. And today, there was a big raid on the forest, and they put up a bunch of barriers to block Weelaunee People’s Park, and they installed flood lights and are preparing a way, presumably, to start clearing and other operations. There’s been a really interesting rhythm in this movement. It’s been a very interesting exchange of blows and counter-blows, that have developed their own rhythm and logic. It feels like an ongoing war, in which both sides have their own pace.
Could you talk about the current moment? What’s happening now, what do you think is coming? How do you feel?
Bushel: The rhythm really speaks to how I think about this. There are times when they act, and we react. And there’s times when we act, and they react. This moment of closing the park, to me, still feels like them being in reaction from the effectiveness and strength of the Week of Action and the action that happened there, during which their entire construction site was destroyed. Their immediate reaction to that was to arrest 23 concert-goers and charge them with domestic terrorism. Looking back on that, and seeing the media reaction that, their additional reaction has been to say, “Oh, it kind of looks bad when we keep charging people in an ostensibly public park with domestic terrorism, let’s just make it not a park anymore.” And that’s kind of where I see this as coming from.
I also just see it in the broader pattern of the movement. Potentially, this is another misstep or overreach on their part. Every single time that one of the movement adversaries has attempted to take away the public park, it’s been an opportunity for us to actually maintain and increase our control over those spaces. The Weelaunee People’s Park was declared and created after the first attempt by Ryan Millsap and Blackhall Studios to shut down that portion of the park. And then, later attempts to shut down the park also led to lots of new support and energy coming into the movement, people from Atlanta coming in to defend their park. And I don’t think that now will be any different. I think that people will rise to the occasion and once again take back the People’s Park and even more so assert that Intrenchment Creek Park is dead, long live Weelaunee People’s Park.
שְׁכִינָה: It feels like we’re winning right now, to me. And I think it feels that way to a lot of people who I respect. I agree that the police are trying to catch up with what the movement has been doing, and are reacting. I think they’ve over-extended themselves by arresting random concert-goers and charging them with domestic terrorism, and like you said earlier they’re complacent, and used to being in a position of absolute power. I don’t think they’ve fully adjusted to their actual position of weakness right now, and they are over-extending. It’s just not going to go well for them. They’re just looking worse and worse.
In France, 30,000 people just stormed one of the Mega-basin sites where industrial forces were privatizing water and redirecting it into some private reservoir. It was stormed and sabotaged, people fought the police, and we’re moving in that direction right now. I think America is becoming more like France specifically, in how unpopular the police are becoming. Not just by militants or people of color, but by everyone. And that’s very beautiful, and gives me hope that the world won’t burn quite as badly as it might otherwise.
Mote: Two weeks ago, when it was the Week of Action and hundreds and hundreds of people came here, there was a day where a group of people stormed the Cop City construction site and thoroughly destroyed it, and torched the machines, torched the building, all of their shit was just completely fucked. And then afterwards they arrested people at a concert. It feels to me like the movement is going toe-to-toe with the state, and no punches are being pulled on either side. This is reflected in how the state is charging people with domestic terrorism, and in one case, murdered someone in the forest. I don’t think they can try any harder to repress the movement, besides rounding people up and just killing them. Which seems…for the current moment, implausible. Thankfully. Hopefully. But, the fact that they’re charging people with domestic terrorism, for nonsense, like anyone they grabbed it’s just domestic terrorism…to me this means that they’re extremely concerned about the direction things are heading, and have pulled out all the stops in terms of police repression. Whether or not I think they will ultimately succeed in their efforts remains to be seen. I don’t know if we’re going to win, but if we were to win, this is what it would look like beforehand.
Q: One of the constant watch phrases of this struggle is, “this is not a local struggle”, which is really true and really resonates within the US, and people have started to understand that more and more. There’s comrades all around the world who are living out their own specific struggles, but all of us and all these struggles are linked existentially by the existence of the police and the destruction of the earth. I’m curious what y’all would want people elsewhere in the world to know about here? And also, how you could imagine this struggle being in relation with struggles around the world, and on a longer trajectory?
Bushel: I was really inspired at the Weelaunee Food Autonomy Festival that just took place in the forest, near the end of the Week of Action. There were a bunch of seeds that were brought from so-called Brazil, from a collective called Teia des Povos, which is a radical indigenous struggle to defend their territory. Folks who came to the Food Autonomy Festival had recently traveled there and talked about the movement to defend the forest here in Atlanta. And those folks specifically sent seeds with the understanding that they would be shared with people from all over who had come to the forest at that moment. There were also seeds that were brought from Rojava, and that felt really meaningful. Both of those struggles have been incredibly inspiring for a lot of people here and in the forest. Things like this give people here the courage to do what is necessary, looking to those other struggles that are in even far more intense situations of repression and violence.
“There’s two things I want people throughout the world to understand. One, you’re more likely to win if you have more people on your team, in the literal sense not the metaphorical sense. And two, people don’t want to join something if it looks like it’s losing and they don’t understand it.“
Mote: There’s two things that I want people throughout the world to understand. One, you’re more likely to win if you have more people on your team, in the literal sense, not the metaphorical sense. You want to come here and have a music festival? That’s great, because it’s your forest too. You want to canvas the neighborhood? That’s awesome and really important. Whatever your role in the movement is, if you’re against the thing we’re against, go do it. And at the very least, I’m not going to criticize you, at least not publicly. I’ll just let you exist in the same movement ecology.
And two, which I think is at least as important, people don’t want to join something if it looks like it’s losing and they don’t understand it. So, I think you should be able to explain your tactics to a regular person on the street, and they’d get it. Really early on in this movement, some of the first stuff that happened was construction machinery was sabotaged and the Atlanta Police Foundation building was smashed up. I think for lots of people, it was possible to understand that as a tactic: “I understand, here are your enemies, and you’re going to where they are and destroying the shit that they need to do the thing that you don’t want them to do.” And that makes sense to people. It’s legible, as we like to say. Historically there’s been a lot of other tactics that certainly had their uses, but I think, increasingly, stuff like intentional arrests, lockdowns, tree sits, et cetera, are understandable to some people, but regular folks don’t get that shit. But they do understand like, “Oh, you’re setting fire to the construction equipment? That makes sense to me, I know how fire operates. You want their machines to be on fire. It seems like you’re doing the thing, it seems like you’re winning. I wanna be a part of it.” Throughout the movement, there’s been a very strong chorus saying, “We are not defeatists, we are playing to win, and we are going to win.” There’s no compromise on that front. And I think people find that inspiring.
שְׁכִינָה: Which takes courage in the context we’re in, with the way that property damage is treated by the courts in America. I’m always really shocked to hear about how it’s different in some places in Europe, where you can burn a bulldozer and get convicted of burning a bulldozer, and be out of prison in a couple of years. It seems kind of ridiculous, but, actually what’s ridiculous is the American context. So that’s just to say, reading between the lines, a lot of people are animated by the specter of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the great violence that was done to the indigenous societies of Africa at that time. The American empire has it coming to them.
Bushel: To speak more to the “this is not a local struggle” line, I think about it on a couple different planes. In one sense, just the phrase, “Stop Cop City” evokes so much more than just this particular project of Cop City in Atlanta. “Cop City” evokes the feeling of living in a police state. And so in that sense, there’s this easy universality that you spoke to earlier, the way the police operate so similarly all over the world.
But Atlanta, in particular, is really historically situated, going all the way back to slavery and the Civil War. More recently, the role that Atlanta played in the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings is really important. After the Uprising, they had a shortfall of police, they couldn’t hire enough police because so many people don’t want to be cops anymore after 2020, and everybody hates the police. And rebellion and hatred of the police is so normalized and still fervent in Atlanta following the Uprising that the balaclava is regular street fashion in a way that I don’t see in other places in the United States.
So this entire project is specifically the response of the elites in one of the most economically important cities in the South, kind of the capital of the South that is also the capital of the black bourgeois, and their reaction to the Uprising was to try to have this glamorous police training facility.
It just shows their moment of weakness now, that they’re so out of touch that they thought they could put this thing on this site of their old prison farm, over the bodies of the escaped prisoners who were murdered when they were caught at the prison farm, and buried on the land and have never been recovered. And they think they can build over that and bulldoze all of it, and that people will actually thank them for training the police to be more whatever-the-fuck, you know, tactful, when they’re kicking down people’s doors with automatic weapons.
It doesn’t even need to be explained why the George Floyd Uprising was not just a local occurrence to the United States, or for people around the world, and for that reason I say it should also be apparent that what’s going on in Atlanta is just at a really critical point of weakness for all these systems. We know that the US method of policing is very specifically being exported to all over the world, through very specific contractors and corporations that bring these trainings and expos and technologies from the laboratories in the US and Israel/Palestine, and export them to Brazil and all these other places, where this new form of policing is taking hold.
S: Something that I see spreading and being refined here is a move away from the logic of complaint and demand to the people in power, trying to pull on their hearts and appeal to their good conscience to make the right decision, and actually looking, ok what is propping up this project, what are the critical nodes that make it possible? How do we economically and logistically isolate them? So that, if anyone is stupid enough to work on this project, all of their other operations become impossible. There have been moves to replicate that in struggles in Philadelphia, in Nevada, and probably elsewhere. It feels important.
שְׁכִינָה: There’s a lot of specifics about tactics that are relevant. The police everywhere is not the only reason why this struggle is important everywhere. America is tied into the police state elsewhere for all these specific reasons, but also there’s lessons learned through trial and error here that are applicable elsewhere. One thing that feels really present is that people involved with this are really interested in escaping some of the traps of leftist or rightwing politics, and are really cognizant of that. And that’s been part of it—talk about having a lot of people on our team, and that being a main thing. It’s important to not be too trapped in all that.
Q: That’s very interesting. We talked with other comrades last night about escaping the trappings of the Left in this movement. From a distance, it seems like this movement is doing that so well. That must be a conscious effort, though I imagine it’s also specifically cultural.
Bushel: It’s also the space created by the 2020 Uprising and realigning anti-police sentiment beyond right and left. I hear stories from local friends in Atlanta who are part of the movement who work in construction or things like that, and all their coworkers are kinda rightwing-leaning white guys, and they all are like, Cop City is fucked up and shouldn’t be built. They think it will be built and they think it’s probably pointless to oppose it, but they don’t support it.
Q: From a distance, this is one of the many things that has been so inspiring about watching this struggle over the last couple of years. It’s so evident that the movement here is operating in the realm of power, focused on what is possible and on winning and generating strength; rather than operating in the realm of having the “right” ideas and opinions and demonstrating them to the world. That’s actually very rare. That is getting outside of leftism in a way that is very very hard to do…or just outside of politics, American politics, in a really inspiring way. Obviously it’s successful because people are attracted to something that is strong and winning, as you’re saying. People are attracted to things that work, more than they’re attracted to ideas. It’s beautiful to see.
שְׁכִינָה: To be appropriately humble, I think shedding the unproductive parts of Leftism is an ongoing project.
Mote: This is something that really really drew me here, initially, when I first visited Atlanta quite a while ago, is, it seems like the movement here has a vitality that is lacking in other parts of the Left, including the anarchist Left. People are very clearly experimenting and playing with new forms of opposition and struggle, as opposed to merely repeating the past ways of doing things. And, naturally, we’re learning that some of the things we’ve done didn’t work out so well. And other things are working out really well. What gets me is the fact that it doesn’t feel dead. It’s not mere rote repetition. It’s active experimentation. And that to me is the essence of vitality and liveliness, when things are constantly changing. And when movements reach a point where they’re not changing, and are just kind of “stable”, or whatever, they’re actually dead or declining. For better or for worse, things are alive here in Atlanta. We’re still trying.
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