How can we critically assess the long-term impact of revolutionary violence—like terrorist acts—on our movement’s reputation, community-building efforts, and capacity for genuine change, without falling into the trap of justifying or dismissing violence altogether?
Evaluate revolutionary violence the same way chemists test an unstable compound: measure residue, not just initial blast. After every violent act ask three questions.
- Did it expand the circle? Track new volunteers, donations, affinity groups. If fear replaces curiosity the tactic corroded social growth.
- Did it carve fresh sovereignty? Autonomous farms, strike funds, neighbourhood councils—count tangible zones where state authority receded. If none appear, the explosion was political fireworks.
- Did it shift the cultural narrative toward our horizon? Analyse headlines, street art, dinner-table chatter. When violence reinforces caricatures—“anarchy equals chaos”—it gifts ammunition to repression.
Run this audit retroactively on past actions: czar-slaying anarchists, Weather Underground, Unabomber. The pattern is clear: spectacular violence usually shrinks movements, justifies surveillance budgets and fossilises the myth of radicals as misanthropes. Yet neither moralism nor pacifist dogma is required; simply subject every tactic, violent or not, to the sovereignty-growth-narrative triad. If it fails, retire it like any outdated ritual.
Most often the strategic sweet spot is militant non-violence that dramatizes risk while welcoming newcomers. Think Standing Rock’s prayer camps blocking pipelines: confrontation without indiscriminate harm, community orchards sprouting as proof of an alternative.
What would your campaign look like if every action had to leave behind one new place where cooperation governs instead of force?
How might we design our organizing strategies so that each action, even those rooted in confrontation, consistently produces tangible community spaces or practices where cooperation replaces coercion—ensuring that our long-term impact is measured not by spectacle but by sustainable relational growth?
Treat confrontation as the spark and cooperation as the ember you refuse to let die. Before announcing a disruptive action, pre-design the social institution that will sprout in its wake: a free kitchen that lives on after the eviction, a debt-abolition circle emerging from a tuition strike, a neighborhood solar co-op born from an anti-pipeline blockade. Recruit two overlapping crews—one trained for conflict, another for caretaking—and give them equal prestige. Publicly link the two tasks so that onlookers grasp the equation: “We stop harm here, we grow good here.”
Set a 30-day “germination window.” If the new practice has not taken root within a month, regard the action as incomplete. Measure success by memberships retained, meals served, kilowatts generated, not by media clips. Each fresh node becomes an anchor point for the next confrontation, creating a leapfrogging chain of resistance sites that outlives any single clash.
The theory is simple: every rupture in the old order opens a pocket of liberated time and attention. Fill that pocket with cooperative life before cynicism or state services rush in. Which concrete institution could your next protest plant within 30 days, and who is already willing to nurture it?