Forest defense and abolition
Cop City is the name people have given to the proposed largest police training facility/mock city in the United States, in Atlanta, Georgia. To build it, the police foundation and their corporate donors will have to destroy 85 acres of the largest urban green space in the country, in a Black working-class neighborhood. The police foundation is on record saying the project’s impetus was the boosting officer morale in the wake of the George Floyd Rebellion and heightened calls for the abolition of police, prisons, and private property. Its purpose is to teach and train police in Atlanta – and from as far away as occupied Palestine – in urban warfare tactics such as bomb and tear gas deployment, high-speed car chases, helicopter landings, etc.
Every city is cop city. For the past two years local abolitionists have mobilized, and invited supporters from around the world to join in the fight, to experience and live in the forest in a continual occupation, and to resist wherever they are by confronting corporate donors and politicians. More and more people are realizing that this is not just a local struggle. And because violence is the only logic this system knows, there’s a seemingly endless budget that the ruling class has to keep throwing at these kinds of efforts anywhere they want.
Through a diversity of tactics, from multiple forms of direct action to lawsuits, to community organizing, the movement has so far disrupted and stalled much of the forest from being destroyed, even as the project is held up in court. In December 2022, six forest defenders were arrested in a raid on the forest and accused of domestic terrorism – an extremely serious charge – a new tactic used by the ruling class’ courts since the repression of the uprising against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2015 and 2016.
Then, on January 18, 2023, during another raid on the forest occupation, Georgia police murdered 26-year-old queer, Afro-Venezuelan revolutionary Manuel Esteban Páez Terán, also known as Tortuguita, and arrested several more on the same terrorism charges. Tortuguita were loved by their community as a deeply thoughtful and sensitive person dedicated to mutual aid, protecting the forest and overthrowing systems of oppression. Brown Cat Mutual Aid, a social media account which Tortuguita facilitated, fundraised supplies for forest defenders as well as other Black and Brown Trans community members in need.
No body cam footage has been released, but police audio from after the shooting strongly indicates that an injured officer was hit by friendly-fire from another officer – not Tortuguita, as their narrative attempting to justify the shooting claims. An independent autopsy eventually confirmed that Tortuguita were in a cross-legged position, with their hands raised and without gunpowder residue, when they were killed by 57 bullets from the Georgia State Patrol.
Whether risking one’s life in a tree-sit as police fire pepper spray at you, or organizing distribution of native food trees for community food sovereignty, or building bridges across movements, revolutionaries in Atlanta are a part of a mass movement across the world where people envision and work towards a world beyond private property. A central base of community and resistance in the forest is known as Weelaunee People’s Park, named for what the original people there, the Muskegee, called the river that connects much of South Atlanta. The Muskegee were forced out in 1821 by the U.S. government, but not before many years of militant resistance to settler colonialist genocide.
From the early stages of this struggle through to today, Muskogee people have been traveling back to their original homelands to become deeply involved in the movement to stop Cop City. They are teaching us all how resistance to police terrorism is rooted in a vision of a new society we can build, where police aren’t necessary, where land is stewarded in common, and non-human relatives are respected.
Decentralized and autonomous movements
Cop City is a clear reaction by the corporate-fascist state to the abolitionist class’ movement towards this new society. Our class’ response is shaping up to be one of the broadest seen in a long time. Its funders come, through the Atlanta Police Foundation, from the ranks of some of the largest and most sinister corporations: Coca-Cola, Verizon, Target, Norfolk Southern, Truist Bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and others. Forty-three percent of the police who would be trained at Cop City will be coming from outside Georgia. This is why the consciousness about Cop City among the abolitionist class is so advanced, becoming the largest urban warfare training facility in the country. Corporations fear what will happen to their hoarded assets after the next act of police terrorism and want their lackeys to be ready. This is going to affect everyone.
#StopCopCity and #DefendtheAtlForest can help shape our analysis on what unity in the abolitionist class can look like. The revolutionaries engaged in the Stop Cop City movement have numerous times acknowledged the strength that comes from, paradoxically, starting from a place of unknowing. We do not actually know what tactics will be the right ones, what it will ultimately take, to stop Cop City. What follows from this understanding is the ability to be flexible in profound ways, to have a broad, “decentralized, autonomous movement,” as Stop Cop City organizers say it. It is a type of movement building that, beautifully, models itself off of the thing they are defending: forests.
Forests are intelligent. More than simply stands of trees, forests are ecosystems of profound complexity. Ecologists have recently proved what many cultures have known for millennia that plants can communicate. Dr. Suzanne Simard is a Canadian researcher studying the ways in which trees share information and nutrients, organizing their ecosystem in a decentralized partnership with the other central character in forests: fungi. Her book “Finding the Mother Tree” is an examination of how this partnership works, as well as how destructive capitalist forest management practices are. The central takeaway for revolutionaries from this work is the importance of networks.
In the soil, and even inside the trees themselves, are infinite biological pathways made up of fungi. Fungal mycelium (the “roots” of mushrooms) are the “Internet” that trees partner with to interact with each other. Trees of the same species are able to recognize and nurture their offspring and communicate about threats, and trees of different species are even able to trade nutrients. This is happening all through mycelium and all while the fungi themselves are trading nutrients for water with the trees, acting like an extended root system.
Revolutionaries are like fungi. Whether connecting different movements or connecting the diversity of tactics within a movement, revolutionaries in Atlanta are enhancing the resiliency of our struggles by acting like a network. Revolutionaries model themselves as decentralized not because they are disparate parts that aren’t connected. Decentralized here means a kind of unity that functions to protect the movement from repression and co-optation by refusing to hold up one central leader or organization. This would leave that “center” to be an easy target for the ruling class.
There are environmental groups, working through the courts, petitions, and through monitoring the harmful effects of construction on the waterways to build a case to stop Cop City. An arm of this branch can be found at movement gatherings, where collectives of eco-minded revolutionaries distribute free native fruit and nut trees and teach about local food production.
Present in full force is the legendary Civil Rights movement in the city which, like many other cities in the South, is experiencing a reignition of Black radicalism and struggles for self-determination in the face of co-optation from the Black elite, voter suppression, and outright violence and austerity from neo-Confederate forces. Additionally, young and a little more white middle-class and anarchist elements are present in the struggle as well. They are radicals who have been working full-time to occupy the forest and, through direct action, to sabotage the means of destruction. These are not listed so as to draw clear lines between groups of people, but rather to represent the infrastructure and ideas of different movements, all fusing into a kind of functional unity. All are united in vision and purpose to stop Cop City while lacking a singular face, organization or tactic. Present as well, in true abolitionist fashion, is a recognition of how movements for housing, education and health care are also deeply connected with this struggle. Revolutionaries on the ground are working to share information and resources between all of these movements and tactics, like fungal mycelium facilitating the resiliency of a forest ecosystem. To become whole as an ecosystem, to become whole as a revolutionary movement, requires balance, intention and communication. The need for both unity of consciousness between ecological and abolitionist struggles and, at the same time, for decentralized tactics in accomplishing our strategy, is among the lessons the whole world is watching unfold in Atlanta.
Published on June 24, 2023
This article originated in Rally!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction
