Good Cop Radicals
How the University & Nonprofits Make Counterinsurgents Out of Middle Class Leftists.

'If [it is] possible [for the counterinsurgent to deprive the insurgent of a good cause], well and good, but we know . . . that for the insurgent a good cause . . . amounts to solving the country's basic problems [This] his opponent cannot [do] without losing his power' (colonel David Galula).

'An insurgent’s enemies are never abstract, but rather discrete entities of flesh, stone, or steel, from bodies to buildings, which at a specific time and place obstruct their interests . . . and are instead defined by their exteriority . . . making elimination of the opposition the basic mode of conflict. Engagement with this sort of enemy is not defined by the effort toward annihilation in the sense that the enemy must die, or that things must be destroyed, but rather in such a way that they cease to be the enemy [when] they become logistically incapable of continuing to obstruct our interests' (‘What is Insurgency?,’ Institute For The Study of Insurgent Warfare).

'If you are of this class you have one choice: fight. Do not despair hopelessly or wallow in guilt. Destroy the systems which have created and propagate you. Betray your race, your class . . . The prisons must be burned, the pipelines must be sabotaged' (‘Decolonise Means Attack,' anonymous zine).

'The state exercises control not only over the institutions of civil society but through them' (Kristian Williams).

This zine (written in Britain in 2025) addresses middle class background participants in radical social movements who are interested in building material solidarity with anti-colonial/anti-patriarchal working class/lumpen organising. I mostly critique the relation between whiteness/the middle class (my standpoint), but the dynamics I detail are broadly relevant. I take it as a given that if we, as middle class people, commit to betraying our class, we have to return our accumulated/inherited capital to, and join, and take risks within, these movements as active participants.

WHAT IS THE MIDDLE CLASS?

We are those with relative social capital (a few calls away from people with some institutional power who can help us get a job or out of trouble), cultural capital (we have some familiarity with what makes these people comfortable in order to benefit from our proximity) and financial capital (property, inheritance, a higher income). Like the working class, the middle class' living mostly comes from selling our labour not capital ownership; we would not be able to survive indefinitely - or survive without a significant drop in living standards - if we stopped working. But unlike the working class, who (to varying degrees) we are social and culturally segregated from, we are comparatively comfortable in our work.

Whilst sharing an exploiter in the capitalist, we are in conflict with the working class through:

1. Being professionalised into/hired as their 'experts' or 'managers;' we are tasked with transmitting a racist/anti-poor culture and ensuring the smooth operation of class exploitation on behalf of the capitalists.

2. Relative property ownership; for example, our flat values would fall if the neighbourhood's 'criminal' economy was left unpoliced.

The middle class types I see in social movements are: the traditional middle class (the old salaried professions e.g. doctors and therapists, educators/researchers, social workers, lawyers) and the professional managerial class, the 'PMC' (coordinator workers that monopolise decision-making and empowering work roles e.g. nonprofit coordinators, staff at bureaucratic unions, arts programmers, civil servants). Included in the 'movement middle class' are those born to capitalist class families who will not inherit/continue ownership of their parents' businesses/rental property/ies (voluntarily or involuntarily) and do not live off their families' capital. Also included are those from middle class/capitalist class backgrounds who voluntarily/temporarily work in working class jobs (bar tenders, baristas, waiters etc).

Quickly. The working class are: the lowest level of the employed, with the lowest wages, benefits, and rights, who have little to no control of their working conditions, management or planning. The lumpen are: the underclass, the unemployed, the marginally employed, 'criminals' (incarcerated or not), aged and disabled working class people, and undocumented people (from the Black Liberation Army's ‘BLA dictionary’).

WHAT IS INSURGENCY? WHAT IS COUNTERNSURGENCY? HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO SOCIAL MOVEMENTS?

Military theorists define insurgency as: an attempt to escalate conflict against, delegitimise and/or overthrow the government - often by force, often illegally - through the use of political factions or groups to achieve or influence a political goal or cause. An insurgency can be small scale or generalised throughout a population. They define counterinsurgency as: the comprehensive civilian and military/police efforts designed to simultaneously defeat and contain this insurgency, and appear to [my addition] address its root causes, in order to regain the confidence and acknowledgement of the populace of the governing power. Both 'sides in [a counterinsurgency] conflict are fighting not just to win, but to own the peace' (‘Counterinsurgency,’ David Kilcullen, U.S. Counterinsurgency advisor).

According to Dharmeratnam Sivaram (an Eelam Tamil guerilla/theorist, martyred 2005), the state is an apparatus securing 3 monopolies. The 1st is the monopoly of surplus product extraction (stealing what is made by a population group beyond their immediate survival needs and transferring it to a ruling class - whether bourgeois capitalist or bureaucratic/‘socialist’ state capitalist), the 2nd is violence, the 3rd law-making. Once the 2nd monopoly is 'established beyond doubt,' it recedes into the 'mediated violence' of the 3rd. 'The state is always focused on destroying the political will of the . . . population [to self-govern/be un-governable,] the . . . science of doing that is counterinsurgency.'

Counterinsurgency (COIN) theorists understand that it is not possible to totally eradicate insurgency. COIN works to produce a social order in which insurgency is continuously - automatically (i.e. by the 'natural' logic of the system) and/or conspiratorially (i.e. by the secret plans of military/police operatives) - 'channelled into safe institutional forms or suppressed by intelligence gathering/police operations' (Williams).

Key western COIN texts include the U.S. Army's/general David Patreaus’ 2006 'Counterinsurgency Field Manual,' British Army general Frank Kitson's 1971 'Low Intensity Operations,' and military/ counterinsurgency experts David Galula’s 1964 ‘Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.’ Their theories were battle-tested in in Iraq and Afghanistan (00s), Malaya and Kenya (50s), the North of Ireland (70s), and Algeria (60s). Mainstream social movement theory/practice furthers, and is an expression of, what they call 'civilian effort' COIN:

COIN = (A). Mainstream social movement expression = (B).

1. A) Isolate (the insurgents - the 'un-reconcilable' - for elimination from the 'reconcilable' - aka the capable of being influenced - general Robert Thompson).

B) Demonisation of militancy, badjacketing (saying militants are undercovers/are from 'outside' the community), and/or completely ignoring militant protest (by choosing to be 'accountable' to movement philanthropy, or to the law, in the case of an insurgency's proscription). Anti-Black racism/Islamophobia plays into counterinsurgent isolation. Black rebellion is dehumanised as 'criminal'/'uninformed' and Muslim rebellion as 'fanatical'/'pre-modern.'

2. (A) Contain (siphon popular energy that could otherwise go in revolutionary directions into 'legitimate' channels - U.S. COIN manual: 'educate and empower the population to participate in legal methods of political discourse and dissent [that] side with the host nation').

(B) Inflexible/automatic emphasis on state-facing/non-violent/symbolic forms of protest. NGO registration forbidding explicit political campaigning/necessitating busy-work (grant applications/reporting etc).

3. (A) Re-legitimise (the state as necessary and/or benign, through making concessions that in no way threaten state power - Kitson: 'win the trust of local opinion makers, learn what motivates them and build this into a narrative that emphasises the 'inevitability and rightness of the [counterinsurgent's] ultimate success').

(B) ‘Entryism’ of anti-oppression/ radical rhetoric taken from the working class/racialised grassroots (Adi Callai) and representation/ tokenising of said groups. Pragmatism (non-reformist reforms/gradualism etc) as a form of 'psychological warfare' (‘activities directed at [a] target audiences’ [attitudes and behaviour] to weaken the will of the enemy to fight and reinforce [state] friendly relationships’ - U.K. COIN handbook) to give the appearance of addressing root causes whilst disappearing the insurgent perspective.

4. (A) Integrate (once isolated, restore the insurgent's identity to one who is 'part' of civil society, provide incentives to desert, reconcile and cooperate e.g. 'offices in a [reformed] administration . . . jobs in [responsible] nonprofits, labour unions, or progressive think tanks' -Williams).

(B) Avenues for professionalisation/ decriminalised activism and wealth accumulation/celebrity for militants.

5. (A) Re-stabilise/re-build (capitalist class relations, 'counter-organise [the insurgency. . . to] build up [government] control of the population . . . put [over] the government's views [through] 'teaching, setting up clinics . . . construction works . . . agricultural projects' - Kitson).

(B) Reorganisation of horizontal (multi generational) mutual aid into depoliticised hierarchical (mono generational i.e. disempowering toward youth and elderly) social services, the self-policed race/class isolation of 'privilege theory,' wealth redistribution going to progressive nonprofits not autonomous working class/lumpen orgs/people directly.

6. (A) Intelligence (developing individual contact information and mapping the social networks of movements BEFORE an insurgency starts. RAND corporation: 'if regimes can infiltrate - or better yet, cooperate with - mainstream groups they are . . . able to gain information on radical activities and turn potential militants away from violence').

(B) Naivety about state surveillance/security (e.g. non-masking at demos/non-encrypted data/comms), dialogue and coordination with the police/voluntary arrest emphasis (= info from 'surrendered enemy personnel' - Thompson), the visibility/reporting mandates that a nonprofit surrenders (= info from 'captured documents' - Thompson).

These steps follow Galula's COIN cycle: Clear ('destroy or expel the main body of . . . insurgents') Hold ('oppose an insurgent's comeback in strength . . . control [the population's] movements . . . to cut off its links with the [insurgents and] destroy the . . . insurgent's political organisation') Build (a 'friendly' social order: group and educate tested leaders into a 'national movement'). The U.S. COIN manual adds Transfer: the withdrawal of foreign COIN forces once allied indigenous 'leadership' have internalised COIN logic: 'the end goal is to create the conditions necessary for the host nation to counter an insurgent independently' i.e. to self-police.

Not understanding and challenging the overlap of COIN and dominant middle class social movement theory/practice has meant that:

1. Uprisings/insurgencies surpass and happen largely outside of and sometimes in direct antagonism with mainstream social movements.

2. The estate left (to use D. Hunter's term for lumpen and working class radicals outside of mainstream movements) is often more capacious in spreading and accelerating conflict, and causing material damage to capital (looting/infrastructure damage e.g. $1-2bill in 13 days in Turtle Island's George Floyd uprising) and incapacitating its enforcers (the pigs). Also, Donald Trump was forced to hide a bunker below the white house!

3. Only a minority of people in the social movement left participate on a level as confrontational of these rebels (including at the level of their collectivism of resources).

4. The forms of organisation of the estate left are invisible to/ignored by the social movement left.

Whenever this type of insurgency accelerates in the Anglo North it tends to be led by autonomous racialised (esp. Black) working class/lumpen people (containing a disproportionate minority, compared to their population numbers, of whites/middle class people).

WHITENESS IS COUNTERINSURGENT

COIN spans both the imperial core (the Global North) and its 'periphery' (the Global South). For example, Kitson wrote: 'British army units should be spread out to be a secret part of all British . . . governing down to the village . . . to crush . . . trade union strikes [and] ethnic minority protest;' and Williams details how the U.S. police studied COIN warfare following their post-60s decline in credibility, and, in turn, U.S. military 'turned to the police for ideas,' facing Iraqi/Afghani insurgencies. However, racism (seeing the Global South, and even POC neighbourhoods in the Global North, as sacrifice zones outside of empathy and 'international' law) is foundational to the force with which COIN is applied.

COINistas racistly see themselves as rational 'civilisers,' tending to self-mythologise their 'protect the population' civilian/political efforts and under-emphasise on-the-ground mass military violence. Though often only indirectly/obliquely advocated in their texts, concentration camps and 'indiscriminate' massacres ('it might be necessary to kill the fish [the insurgent] by polluting the water [the population]' - Kitson) are used against Palestinian, Kenyan, and Vietnamese populations, not - to quote J. Sakai - against white anti-nuclear committees in Manhattan. Whole societies resisting colonial absorption are viewed as insurgents/'terrorists’/‘criminals' - rhetoric to cover for genocide but also unconsciously revealing their frustration that the society they hope to dominate cannot be co-opted and reorganised towards their interests as easily as in the imperial core/'zones of whiteness' (Peter Gelderloos).

According to Sivaram (reflecting on his experiences resisting the Sri Lankan state) COIN's modern military expression (routinely deployed in the Global South) originates in British Malayan/Kitson-theorised operations. It looks like (in addition to the 6 aforementioned civilian efforts): 7. massacres and terror 8. arrest, detention, torture 9. checkpoints/constant checks (I would add forced mass population displacement/concentration - hundreds of thousands of Malayans were put by the British in jails aka police/military controlled 'new villages' and collective punishment via curfews/blockading food) and 10. the promotion of unaccountable vigilante groups. '

You treat the target population as a prisoner: break its will, reduce its expectations to bare minimum . . . so [Tamils] aspirations are depressed from separatism to being allowed to travel without being shot. And then the nice guys - the NGOs . . . come and talk to you [and offer you a constitution,] and you start giving them intelligence and you become pliant' (Sivaram).

The west/whiteness is a counter-insurgent identity construct designed to create a largely pacified (pliant) population block in which relations of domination are stabilised ('established beyond doubt' – Sivaram) precisely because this region of the world has already given up so much (has so little to defend) in terms of autonomy/communal ownership of land/the means of production. In exchange for loyalty, whiteness (aka ‘security’) is promised. This is a protection racket. Pay your taxes, follow our rules, watch who comes in and out, and we’ll leave you alone.

Less common Global North/white insurgents are more readily crushed as outliers or assimilable into the state/capital without the need for the mass militaristic violence described by Sivaram to break their (insurgents'/aggrieved populations') collective bonds/steadfastness. Britain's Angry Brigade (1970-72), West Germany's the June 2nd Movement (1972-80), the U.S.'s Weather Underground (WU, 1969-77), whilst still treated like shit, are treated closer to the idealised '[COIN] myth [of non-coercion]' (‘Big Wars and Small Wars,’ colonel David Benest). They are spoken of in pathologising terms (being mentally ill), so as to shore up the state-supporting identity formation of whiteness as healthy/normal.

PATRIARCHY/ABLEISM ARE COUNTERINSURGENT

The care/support networks (what Kilcullen calls ‘links:’ its internal relations and their relations with external support) of a politicised population in which insurgents are a fighting node are considered the main focus of counterinsurgency. Movement misogyny/transphobia/ableism therefore aligns with COIN objectives: it incapacitates and fractures these link networks (and the knowledge/energy held within them) by abandoning/violating those disproportionately tasked with their long term maintenance: women/disabled/queer people. Kilcullen: ‘successful [insurgencies] exhibit . . . the ability to maintain . . . stable internal conditions despite fluctuations in external environment’ (state repression). ‘We might think of these misogynists [abusing women and/or queer folks] as inadvertent agents of the state. Regardless of whether they are actually informants . . . the work that they do supports [state] terror against social movements and the people who create them' ('Why Misogynists Make Great Informants' zine). ‘[Once the links are] interdicted . . . the insurgency’s energy [and] resilience dissipate. [Now] inroads can be made into disrupting it’ (Kilcullen). If the work of reproducing an insurgency is not anti-patriarchal/anti-ableist it will not reproduce itself at all.

ANTI-COLONIAL WORKING CLASS INSURGENCY SHATTERS FIXED IDENTITY

IMO Black and Palestinian liberation movements have contributed the most to shattering the lethargy and confusion social movement activity in the Global North between 2014-2025.

It was not by trying to 'convince' me on the terms I was comfortable with, but by illegally rupturing what seemed socially possible, becoming an irresistible social force, that demands: get behind us or get out the way, I had the choice of being able to calibrate my loyalties closer to insurgency. It was those who burned down police stations/escaped prison camps that taught me that the police and captivity are intolerable, more than any academic or progressive nonprofit.

I hope this zine can contribute to massifying exceptions to middle class loyalty, so other people younger than I don't have to waste the time I did participating in the various dead end containers of the mainstream left.

I hope to cultivate a revolutionary anti-essentialism in this zine informed by Palestinian guerilla intellectual and martyr Basel al-Araj:

'I have become convinced of [the division] of the world [into a colonial camp and a liberation camp.] In each of the two camps, you will find people of all religions, languages, races, ethnicities, colours, and classes' … 'Every Palestinian (in the board sense, meaning anyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary identities), is on the front lines of the battle for Palestine, so be careful not to fail in your duty' (‘Eight Rules and Insights on the Nature of War’).

and the 2nd of June Movement:

'’The arena for [a fighting class is] neither the factory nor the neighbourhood but the struggle itself, which had to be led everywhere. Its subject [is] everyone who [is] fighting . . . there [is] no 'revolutionary subject,' [you have] to create this subject' (‘Hash Rebels to Urban Guerillas: A Documentary History of the 2^nd of June Movement’).

Anti-colonial working-class struggle (whilst resolutely self directed) is open to, and consists of, all those who are willing to fight for it. Our commitment to struggle is what distinguishes an insurgent from a counterinsurgent more than any essentialised identity.

WHAT DOES COUNTERINSURGENT 'SOLIDARITY' LOOK LIKE?

I. what happened to the radicals?

‘The [insurgent's] narrative explains who is to blame for grievances, how grievances will be addressed, and how the population and insurgency should work together to accomplish the goal' (U.S. COIN manual).

‘Some insurgents . . . simply cannot be co-opted or won over; they must be hunted down, killed, or captured' (Kilcullen).

'[Abolitionism's] contradictory relationship to the nonprofit industrial complex [NPIC]/Academia/Media . . . funnelled much of its energy into a . . . procedural approach . . . The overrepresentation of the 'procedural' flavour of abolition [winning and defending 'non-reformist reforms' enshrined in policy] is symptomatic of its non-conflictual character . . . its ascendency in public discourse after the summer of 2020 [as opposed to the autonomous/insurrectionary flavour] is likely because it is the least threatening to capital' ('Abolition, Counterinsurgency, and Praxis,' anonymous zine).

‘Universities are not designed to build revolutionaries. They're designed to create people to solve problems so that you don't have a revolution' (‘In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities,’ Joy James).

'Hungry to learn more about the world and how to change it, fresh activists turned to the remnants of the last generation of high struggle. Only instead of finding the history in their neighbourhoods, grandparents, political organisations and prisons, they found them in books written by university-educated people . . . overwhelmingly disengaged from struggle' (‘With Allies Like These: Reflections on Privilege Reductionism,’ Common Cause Ottawa).

‘Influential local leaders, such as town elders, technocrats, doctors and lawyers, can often be powerful allies since they are crucial to attracting people to [COIN] projects’ (U.K. COIN manual).

According to Hiram Riviera, COIN theory highlights 4 types of people/mindsets within (potentially) insurgent social movements. 1. Radicals. 2. Idealists. 3. Pragmatists. 4. Opportunists.

Using his example of the Palestinian solidarity movement:

1. Radicals see the entire zionist entity as a settler-colonial enemy that must be forced to leave by organised struggle up to and including armed resistance.

2. Idealists are opposed to the violence of the zionist entity, and like the idea of a free Palestine, but approach the entity from a moralist (I don't approve of what you do) rather than a materialist viewpoint (it is up to us to end what you do).

3. Pragmatists (aka the proceduralists/gradualists) do have a concrete plan, but it largely operates within the enemy's parameters - its legality and its sense of what is immediately possible (i.e. the zionist entity/its supremacist settler identity isn't going away tomorrow, so let's organise for small winnable goals today).

4. Opportunists, who seek to gain capital/clout/political office through piggybacking a radicalism they later abandon (e.g. NYC 'anti-zionist' mayor Zorhan Mamdani condemning direct action against IOF-owned businesses upon assuming office).

COINistas see 2, 3, and 4 as reachable. Radicals are likely intractable, and as such, it is largely a waste of time trying to re-incorporate them (whilst they are mobilised) into state facing projects. They are to be eliminated: guerillas are killed, solidaristic radicals taking direct action are locked up pre-trial and called terrorists, and those offering support are called terrorist sympathisers and fired from their jobs.

* Joy James uses the example of the academic/abolitionist and former political prisoner Angela Davis to illustrate U.S. state's relationship to participants of (potentially) insurgent social movements. 'Davis reflects the civil/human rights mandates that are well funded/popular in the network built within academia,' these involve 'pragmatic compromises.' James contrasts the treatment of Davis with the treatment of Ruchell Magee and George and Jonathan Jackson, 3 other Black liberation militants. All 4 were legally tied together in 1970 in an act of resistance in which Jonathan and Magee used firearms registered in Davis' name to take a judge hostage during the trial of Jonathan's brother, George, a political prisoner, so as to leverage his immediate release. During the stand-off, Jonathan and the hostages were murdered by Californian law enforcement, and Magee was captured. From prison, George maintained that he was a slave, that the U.S. was fascist, and that it would take revolutionary war to free Black people. He was assassinated by guards shortly after the hostage stand-off. Magee, who also described himself as a captive/slave, remained imprisoned for 6 decades. Davis (whose trial focused on her civil rights and not the argument that she was a enslaved/a prisoner of war) is closer to point 3 procedural/pragmatic abolitionism rather than point 1 the insurrectionary/autonomist abolitionism of the Jacksons'/Magee. She was released after 16 months following a widely publicised trial with international celebrity support (its fundraising component was headed by the mainstream feminist Gloria Steinhem, previously associated with the CIA!).

Davis' abolitionism could be professionalised as an academic and a movement celebrity and her proceduralist praxis could be integrated without needing to be eliminated. Magee and the Jacksons' were lumpen. Their insurrectionary/insurgent/autonomous abolitionism could not. This is not to denigrate Davis' choices. Her contributions to prison abolition have been important to many people’s/prisoners' radicalisation. She was under immense pressure as a political prisoner, and it is understandable to strategically appeal to the legitimacy of the state in trying to free oneself. It is just to point out that professionalism as a structure (i.e. being welcomed into the middle class of academia - the social capital of people who can help you get out of trouble and the cultural capital of being seen as 'worthy of rescuing') necessitates the disavowal of insurgency. The Jacksons' writings are concerned with logistics and infrastructure and how to sabotage it with guerilla tactics. Davis' are not. In 2014 Davis asserted that 'President Barack Obama was part of the Black Radical Tradition,' by association/indirectly linking the drone bombing imperialist to her former communist and Black Nationalist comrades and herself (James).

The integration of 60s/70s radicals into academia is a victory for COIN. Revolution moves away from the specificity of immediate direct confrontation to the abstraction of pressuring/pragmatism. Non-extractive co-theorising/co-ordination with lumpen fighting formations/communities (aka the BLA and non-professional racialised communities) becomes structurally discouraged. Insurgency organises the grievances of a population into a direct confrontation with their origin: the racist state/capital. COIN spatially removes/promotes radicals away from this aggrieved population and into a professional/aspiring professional one. With the radicals isolated or killed, the state can present pragmatists formerly proximate to lumpen-led insurgency as the only radicals.

Those socialised into middle class professionalism (the privileged knowledge/skills that will lead to social recognition, authority to coordinate others, and relative economic stability) rather than those embedded in the collectivist/mutual aid networks of the racialised working class/lumpen and its proximity to direct state violence, are more capable of being integrated into 'respectable' civil society. Not ultimately because they are less 'radical,' but because they are already trained in cultural/behavioural codes (and have less organic ties to those who might demand they collectivise its rewards) so to make this process smoother. The U.S. COIN manual: 'whilst it is unlikely [insurgents] will change [their] beliefs, it is possible to change their behaviour . . . counterinsurgents must leave a way out ['liberal and generous surrender terms'] for [those] who have lost the desire to continue the struggle.' 'If the re-integration process does not provide alternative economic opportunities to the former combatants, the likelihood of their return to violence substantially increases.' Professionals can return to a life away from relative state violence and accountability to those subject to it, whereas the racialised lumpen cannot.

* Like many other middle class radicals I was politicised as an undergraduate; my politicisation passed through a useless but predictable silo I had every incentive not to leave. This silo was shaped by so-called post '68 French critical theory/post-structuralism (Michel Foucault/Jacques Derrida/Roland Barthes etc); 'required reading' in humanities departments. This led me to a progressivism that was anti-capitalist in name; but whose power analysis was nebulous, avoiding more rigorous self-reflection as to the material complicity I/left academia had in racial capitalism. It/I was disconnected from revolutionary history and had no connection to the everyday struggles of working class and lumpen people. This allowed it/me to think of media orientated art activism as a kind of individual battle against capitalism, fought through artistic/discursive experiments.

As Gabriel Rockhill points out, many post '68 French theorists were disconnected from (and afraid of!) the student/worker insurgency they are historicised alongside. 'Foucault . . . was in France for only a few days during the uprisings, and . . . did not participate in them [in fact] he had personally participated in the Gaullist academic counter-reform' that was being protested against. Derrida described himself as 'on guard' during the uprisings. Barthes described them as 'painful.' To paraphrase U.S./Palestinian academic (fired for his anti-zionism) Steven Salatia: being a radical is not an attitude, but is proved by the material consequences of one's ethical commitments in the world and the anxiety this causes to the social and economic classes invested in the status quo. A radical does not resort to pearl clutching liberalism at the first hint of insurgency. Salatia points to U.S. academic Judith Butler’s ‘both-sides’ condemnation of Palestinian anti-genocide resistance forces (‘Customs of Obedience in Academe,’ 2024). '’The fashionable French theorists critical of '68 rode the . . . wave of discursive radicality and profited . . . from a market niche that was being globalised by the Anglo-U.S. academy, [whilst] the radical intellectuals involved in '68 faced . . . cultural demotion and direct repression' (‘The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia,’ Rockhill).

* In 60s/70s movements it appeared more normal for middle class radicals (esp. the racialised middle class) to orientate themselves to insurgency rooted in working class and lumpen communities in ways that were not beholden to the social worker/client relationship and expert/layperson relationship encouraged in the NPIC/academia. Middle class militants, such as Black anti-colonialists Amilcar Cabral and Walter Rodney, and the Italian insurrectionary anarchist Alfredo Bonanno, popularised calls for the middle class to 'return to the source' of landless farmers, to 'ground' in street/lumpen communities, and to 'come home' to the working class, in ways that could be seen as passé/elicit eye rolls if said by today's middle class radicals.

Cabral and Rodney were assassinated, and Bonanno (whose work remains obscure) was imprisoned for 8 years.

As D. Hunter states, estate left radicals (like the Jackson brothers) tend to be less visible to the mainstream left, not because they are apolitical, hate anti-oppression politics, or are too scared/tired to 'take the risk' (what the radical middle class may assume), but because their middle class comrades have come to resemble the social workers/teachers that treated them like shit, are dismissive/punishing of requests to take real confrontational action, and do not prioritise organising in working class/lumpen communities. Aka these groups are annoying and don't get the goods.

II. privilege washing white property.

'Racism awareness training has been able to miss-appropriate black politics and black history - and degrade black struggle . . . don't ask me to give you racial awareness training. I'm not into potty training for whites . . . I'm not interested in your thoughts. I don't care about whether [that] police officer is racist' (‘Racism Awareness Training and the Degradation of Black Struggle,’ A. Sivanandan).

'If you look at, for instance, Peggy McIntosh’s definitive text on white privilege, she talks about the privilege of being able to chew with your mouth open. I don’t give a fuck about chewing with my mouth open' (‘How It Might Should Be Done,’ Idris Robinson).

Parallel to poststructuralist critical theory, lies the comparatively practical school of thought sometimes called 'critical whiteness studies;' white people telling other white people how to recognise our privilege and become white allies (associated in the U.S. with Peggy McIntosh, author of 'White Privilege: The Invisible Knapsack;' and Robin DiAngelo, author of 'White Fragility: Why It's So Hard To Talk To White People About Racism'); or in the media: white people renouncing and apologising for their privilege (e.g. Laura Trevelyan, British reparations campaigner/descendant of enslavers in Grenada).

This seems useful: white people are no longer ignoring/denying how we perpetuate dynamics of racism in our interpersonal lives, and are taking the labour upon ourselves, to unlearn, rather than downplay, the supremacist and entitled attitudes that exhaust, insult, and baffle people of colour. We are acknowledging that our relative wealth in comparison to racialised people is a result of racism, to the point of advocating for the redistribution of wealth/income.

However, the white anti-racist trainers fail to account for the vast majority people of colour globally who are not in everyday interactions with white people, and that most people of colour in the Global North (being predominately what marxists call the 'super-exploited' working class) are couriers, care workers, warehouse operatives etc, and not in everyday social/cultural interaction with the white liberal-to-progressive humanities graduates who these books are marketed to. They leave out the antagonistic/controlling relation (school exclusions, child removals etc) the progressive white middle class has to working class people of colour and their kids, as their teachers, social workers etc; and they under theorise how to address police/border violence and the (sometimes violent) anti-state self defence responses they necessitate.

These intellectuals paint white 'allyship' as being a 'good' professional colleague: to assimilate more racialised middle class people to work for racist empire in 'nice' 'reflexive' workplaces.

To DiAngelo and McIntosh, racism is not undone by anti-colonial insurgents (and defectors to their cause) struggling by any means necessary for land and self determination (the Malcom X aka El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz model aka a materialist analysis pointing to collective action), but by white people acknowledging systemic racism (aka a psychological analysis pointing to personal action): I notice that white ppl have more expensive shit and are treated better and it is not fair. If they highlight the agency of racialised people and don't just infantilise people of colour as vulnerably waiting for white benevolence, it is the agency of entrepreneurial/professional types (those whose desires align more with their class interests/norms e.g. Ibram X Kendi, Kimberlie Crenshaw, who have links to billion dollar philanthropy, the Democratic party etc).

Rarely does the white anti-racist trainer highlight the needs of the racialised janitor who clean the offices of the upper-PMC types DiAngelo offers workshops to and NEVER do they highlight the agency racialised working class or lumpen people who are struggling illegally/confrontationally and/or with arms (aka racialised people who will take away the choice from them as to whether to redistribute their wealth or not). Black anarchist and former political prisoner Lorenzo Komboa Irvin put it bluntly: 'these [white] anti-racist trainers . . . serve no useful function at all [and are] a fraud upon the movement.'

'Privilege' - their preferred analysis of power - is co-opted from pan-African communist W.E.B Du Bois' theory of the 'psychological wage' of whiteness from his 1935 text 'Black Reconstruction,' which argues that whiteness is a bribe from the white ruling class (aka the deputising of police violence to white workers) given to consolidate white working class loyalty to the anti-Black state, discouraging allying with Black revolutionary organising (which he argued was in their long term interest).

Du Bois' 'psychological wage' was developed into 'white privilege theory' by the Soujourner Truth Organisation (STO), a majority white U.S. 70s/80s autonomist marxist group, to reflect on their difficulties in workplace organising in getting white workers (clinging petty workplace race privileges) to support their Black co-workers' agitation. To Du Bois/the STO whiteness is counter-revolutionary identity that must be abolished in Black-led communist struggle (that will free Black workers from racism and capitalism, and white workers from capitalism). This is not what whiteness is to Peggy McIntosh or Robin DiAngelo.

To white anti-imperialists/socialists David Gilbert (WU) and Marilyn Buck 'allyship' meant working face-to-face with the BLA (a decentralised group of Black marxists, nationalists, anarchists and Muslims) who they had wildly different backgrounds to; expropriating money from capitalist banks as 'wealth redistribution'/'reparations,' and helping break Black people out of captivity (e.g. Assata Shakur) as 'reckoning with the legacy' of slavery.

DiAngelo and McIntosh disregard via omission the type of militancy of Gilbert and Buck, and those suffering/martyred for taking similar risks today (e.g. U.S. anarchist/abolitionist political prisoner Casey Goonan and U.S. anti-fascist Michael Reinoehl) as being a legitimate tradition of white allyship; and so render working class/lumpen Black insurgency and white assistance to it invisible/unthinkable. Instead they encourage non-threatening (i.e. useless) psychological reflection amongst the white middle classes (to boost POC assimilation) as anti-racism.

McIntosh and DiAngelo's white ally is doomed to go round in circles (no matter what you do you will be a racist, but don’t feel guilty!) when not rooted in actual multi-racial collective struggle from which trusting and honest relationships can develop.

'We urge the British government to enter into . . . negotiations with [Carribean] governments . . . to make . . . reparations through CARICOM' (the Trevalyn family).

'[CARICOM's reperations campaign is a] stage managed ruse . . . in collaboration with the Empire' (‘Britain ‘Permits’ Bermuda to Join CARICOM: The Fraud of CARICOM Revealed, Again,’ Clash Collective).

Laura Trevelyan acknowledges that her family's wealth is immoral and that it should be returned to Grenadians (precisely £100,000 of the £3mill in today's money her ancestors were paid in 'compensation' for their loss of human 'capital'). The £100,000 set up a fund directed by Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission. CARICOM is the official federation of Caribbean nation states.

Clash Collective, a group of Caribbean revolutionaries (inspired by the Rojava revolution and the Zapatistas), describe CARICOM as their 'mortal enemy,' a 'fraudulent . . . federation . . . not accountable to the people,' but instead to their funders: USAID and the European Community. They point out the hypocrisy of CARICOM leading a reparations campaign 'against' the British, whilst quietly accepting Britain's colony Bermuda as a member state.

Trevelayn's silence toward radical working class movements in the Caribbean (she never mentions Grenada's 70s/80s 'New Jewel' socialist movement overthrown by U.S. invasion in 1983) and her silence toward U.K.-backed zionist colonial genocide (in the name of 'combating' Palestinian resistance factions) shows she has no accountability to those on the front lines of materially destroying white supremacy: and so she has no real interest in ending white supremacy. It is hard to see where the white anti-racist ally ends and class preserving P.R. begins.

Trevelyan, DiAngelo, and McIntosh's discourse (esp. the concepts of privilege and allyship) rather than written off as liberal/nothing to do with us have an echo in the social movement white left that needs interrogating e.g.:

» Being in solidarity with racialised people involves publicly declaring your complicity in racism, whilst not meaningfully redistributing the capital accrued from it, beyond a fraction to those most proximate to your class position.

» Implicitly centring the professional standpoint as the focus of anti-racism rather than an anti-racism rooted in working class organising.

» Seeing whiteness in vague terms between interpersonal behaviour, warped psychology, and historical trauma, not a material thing that we have a responsibility to attack - prisons, pipelines etc.

» Implicitly seeing people of colour as a vulnerable monolith not those with agency waging war against a nightmare colonial present in multiple/often conflicting fronts: from liberal/integrationist, to revolutionary nationalist, to reactionary nationalist, to religious, to marxist/maoist, to anarchist/anti-state communist; from which you must choose alliance.

III. negotiated management: the NPIC vs the George Floyd uprising.

'As the summer [rebellions of 2020] wore on and the counterinsurgency went into full swing, the riots became less frequent, and racial boundaries were increasingly re-imposed by a loose alliance of “white allies” and “Black leaders” working in tandem with local politicians, nonprofits, and businesses […] behind [this] counterinsurgency lie billion-dollar philanthropies, universities, the state, and the white middle class' (‘The Revolutionary Meaning of the George Floyd Uprising,’ Shemon, Arturo and Atticus Bagby-Williams).

Evidence from the field is telling us that bottom-up community-based, civil society [COIN] approaches are having much greater success’ (Kilcullen).

'We always get these calls for the Black leadership from white liberals whenever the windows start to crack' (Robinson).

'It is necessary to point out that a great deal of non-violent action does not warrant the description of subversion at all, because it is not seriously designed either to overthrow the government, or to force concessions out of it . . . some of it, especially that which concerns the activities of university students, is best described as educational . . . or even as recreational' (Kitson).

'Do you listen to the anxious BIPOC radicals telling people to not act autonomously, or to the Black rioters smashing cars and shooting fireworks at the police? . . . Do you notice when there actually isn’t a unified BIPOC voice, a BIPOC leadership, in the room you’re in? Who is in most need of your solidarity? How will you choose?' (‘Follow the Fires: Insurgency Against Identity,’ Haraami).

‘Money offers a cost effective means for pulling community support away from the insurgents […] Emphasis should be given to putting a local face on the distribution of funds and to creating a strong sense of local ownership of projects [COIN] mission command should apply to money as much as any other weapon’ (U.K. COIN manual).

'It is important to get across that the [state's] benefits are a reward and a consequence of security, not a bribe' (‘Defeating Communist Insurgency,’ Thompson).

'City grants aren’t awarded to those setting dumpsters on fire' ('On Gentrification,' Confrontaciones).

The nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) is a system of NGOs that in order to receive restricted private foundation money (and sometimes government money) via grant applications create legally bound internal processes, a board of directors, and make their board minutes and fiscal accounting accessible to the government. NGOs essentially operate within the legalistic/hierarchical structures that bind a corporation. The private foundations they depend on are used by the top end of the capitalist class to invest/protect their wealth, since the money they 'donate' into it is exempt from tax. Foundations are obliged to 'gift' a very small percentage of their foundation's income each year, so their wealth can still grow. This percentage can go to tax exempt institutions such as private schools or paying their friends/family to be on the board of trustees or the operating staff. A minority of private foundations also fund progressive 'social change' nonprofits (to privilege wash their profits). Progressive nonprofits create a (tax deductible!) container disciplining would-be revolutionaries into staff.

As a structure, the nonprofit is institutionally rigid/top-down. They disempower grassroots communities/‘constituencies’ (the so-called ‘uneducated,’ ‘feral’ insurgents, the U.K. COIN manual fears most!) whose innovation and boldness are not in command of the organisation’s form/direction. This has a ‘conservative effect.’ ‘Leaders [aka paid staff/board of directors] tend to use all [their] power to retain [their positions. They] come to regard the organisation, and [their] own office, as more important than the professed goals’ [and the rank and file] ‘of the organisation’ (‘The Law of Oligarchy,’ C. W. Cassinelli). U.S. colonel John Nagl stresses, organisations who empower their grassroots are ‘learning institutions’ (‘Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam’). And that, more so than military capability, adaptation is what makes insurgencies win (Nagl. Kilcullen). The Peoples Want (a collective of autonomous internationalists) write in their 2025 manifesto: revolutionary organisations must make plans: but draw them up in pencil. Nonprofits plans need their capitalist funders’ approval, to be adapted to their agenda and timeline, and then are drawn up in an unerasable contract.

* Applied to racialised populations the NPIC’s aggregate effect is neocolonial: the outward appearance of self determination middle-managed by professionals conceals a submissive/dependant relationship with imperialism/white patronage (‘Settlers,’ J. Sakai). Professionalisation is NOT separate from whiteness as a mode of behavioural governance that incentivises and rewards state loyalty.

The white movement middle class imposes itself via the bribe of social/cultural legitimacy and - to a lesser extent - donations, as the 'ally' of (some) racialised people. An effect of which is the thwarting of POC professionals' alliance with the racialised working and lumpen class, as well as the white middle class' own relationship with the white working class whom they stereotype (so as to absolve their own more structurally empowered whiteness) as hopelessly racist/nationalist. But it was this estate left: Black working class and lumpen people and their multi-racial accomplices (including working class/lumpen whites!) who assaulted white property en masse in England in 2011 and Turtle Island in 2020, NOT the activists orbiting the NPIC!

It appeared more normal for the radicalising white middle class to attend (and fund) symbolic/pacifist marches led by NGOs, buy Robin DiAngelo's 'White Fragility,' and declare ourselves permanently racist (abandoning militancy for orderly spectacle and privatising/psychologising racism away from naming the state/capital as irredeemably guilty) instead of unequivocally backing (god forbid joining!) confrontational/criminal activity against white property and its pig enforces. This type of anti-racism could never be race treachery because it was class obedience.

This was justified via anti-Black racism/poor hatred: the riots are bleak and sad (contrast this to Yannick Marshall talking back to crying landlord rapper Killer Mike re. the riots: 'why are you [so upset], I've never been so happy my whole life!'); dismissing the rioters as disorganised and apolitical (as opposed to the nonviolent NGOs who 'represent the community'); and a narrative of Black vulnerability and innocence which appealed to the white middle class more than Black agency and criminality.

The ruling class, the white middle class, and the NGOs, tried to police movement activity into nonconfrontation with the state/white property, using the rhetoric of anti-oppression: acknowledging very real risk differences between white and racialised insurgents (but doing little to provide long term support to the many racialised insurgents ready to take this risk - see the 'Anarchist Perspectives on Privilege Discourse' zine) as a form of counterinsurgent entryism to demonise criminality as privileged/oppressive.

'[By falsely associating militancy with whiteness and privilege] the marginalised [are infantilised] to justify a politics in which violent and conflictual ways of being are disqualified in the name of 'keeping the less privileged safe' . . . this is easier than confronting their real fear, namely, that non-white people and other marginalised groups might truly slip out of anyone's control' (‘Addicted to Loosing,’ Athena). The 'anti-racist' organisations (the mythic 'Black leadership,' a 'figment of the white liberal imagination' - We Still Outside Collective) backed by the white capitalist class will keep you 'safe' via 'good' protestor behaviour. The 'bad' protestor engaging in 'criminal' or 'terrorist' activity - racist dog-whistles - can only put people at risk, and so is bringing on their own repression, rather than the police/the state being responsible. COIN harnesses - rather than ends - movements, so long as they accept the state’s military legitimacy and abandon all counter-violence. Kilcullen calls COIN armed social work (aka 'community organising, welfare, mediation, domestic assistance, economic support . . . requiring armed support'); it attempts to reorganise AND mobilise the targeted population into civil society NGOs with the outward form of self determination but dependant on white patronage (Sakai's definition of neo-colonialism).

This reflects the conflicted role of the middle class in challenging racist capitalism. 'The PMC . . . often mix hostility towards the capitalist class with elitism towards the working class' (Barbara and John Ehrenreich). '’They . . . have traditionally ignored the masses, failed to analyse their own social structure and develop a coherent plan' (‘Mediations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth,’ James Yaki Sayles).

This dynamic of neo-colonial 'anti-racism' over and against anti-colonial attack was most visibly revealed when Rayshard Brooks' (a young Black man killed by the Atlanta pigs) long-time white partner Natalie White was doxxed out as a 'privileged outside agitator' by Twitter activists for the (alleged) burning of the Wendy's fast-food outlet where Rayshard was killed. She was then jailed as a result. 'Every time we cross over those racial boundaries and meet each other as human beings, this is when we will be criticised, especially by the most advanced parts of . . . counterinsurgency' (Robinson). Whether or not a militant in question is 'privileged' is not what is important. What is important is that combative/disruptive action be continually trumpeted as coming from the outside and NOT from within the resistance traditions of the oppressed.

* Too Black and Rasul Mowat said the function of the NPIC during the George Floyd uprising was to 'launder Black rage.' The 'social capital' Black rebellion produces, 'the clarion call by the Black masses for a free and equitable world,' is 'cleaned of [its] original people,' for a new Black elite to receive the 'crumbs of surplus value' (aka philanthropic capital) that rebellion generates. Overthrow Media: 'Mike Brown's father [a lumpen Black man murdered by the pigs in 2014] sued the BLM [Global Network for exploiting their son's name, whilst] political prisoners from the Ferguson [uprising remained] incarcerated, [and whilst his family] received no assistance from [the BLM Global Network].' To quote the 2021 BLM Grassroots summit on accountability from the BLM Global Network: '['this social movement managerial class'] profited from the deaths of Black men and women around the country . . . raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from high-end speaking engagements . . . invitations to the White house and celebrity events' and 'buying a six million dollar [mansion].' Overthow Media: the tokenising 'white gaze [and white folks' money] upholds this.' 'The biggest megaphone [is] inevitably [the one] paid for with white money' (‘They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements,’ Gelderloos).

Some radicalising white middle class people are down for revolution (and are open to learn how to best serve it) they are just misdirected by COIN, and some of us, if we are being honest, are not (and even fear it!) and prefer the opportunities/comforts that COIN offers.

'Audience Q: [For purposes] of building community power and autonomy are nonprofits safe to engage in at all? Lorenzo Komboa Ervin A: No!' (‘Black Anarchist Legacies’).

IV. communism without the working class: the abandonment</em> of their <em>care networks is why they don't trust us.

‘When it comes to resource sharing, collective support, just genuine fucking class solidarity, nothing I’ve seen in anti-capitalist movements has surpassed what I saw in the first 25 years of my life [when] I lived in what this nation-state would consider poverty' (‘All The Privilege, No Fucking Praxis,’ D. Hunter).

'’The state didn't care about us . . . we had to find out how are we going to house ourselves in the face of this . . . it wasn't even an option for us to compromise . . . the example for me has always been [the Black/Brown queer/trans] Ballroom community. How [did] we get [food, clothing, medicine, basic safety] outside of the state . . . outside of the nonprofit? . . . because we didn't qualify . . . I was cared for tremendously [We made] a dollar out of 15 cents . . . I don't find many people turning to [us to] find out what care looks like' (‘Charity, Control, Or Solidarity: Reclaiming ‘Care’ as Revolutionary Praxis,’ Stevie Wilson in conversation with Joy James).

'People from the ranks of the middle class are quick to describe the masses as backward, unorganised and undisciplined. They usually see the self-movement of ordinary people as disorganisation . . . The ordinary man and woman . . . demonstrate[s] a phenomenal capacity to organise in society what revolutionaries, socialists, Marxist-Leninists, etc try to organise in heir heads . . . It was the 'unorganised' masses who congregated on the streets, defied curfews, engaged in direct physical confrontation with the police' (‘Organisation and Spontaneity: The Theory of the Vanguard Party and its Application to the Black Movement,’ Kimanthi Mohammed).

,quote> '’The outlaw’s transition to national or political action . . . is a smooth one. It is not marred by the same complexities of the transitions of members of the bourgeoisie, for example, which require a rejection of their social class and of the rituals, customs, and material comfort it provides' (‘Exiting Law and Entering Revolution,’ al-Araj).

Inheritance and family/generational wealth is taboo in social movements. Radicals from middle and capitalist class backgrounds in the Global North in their 20s/30s/40s, may inherit 6, even 7, figures.

It is taboo because middle class people worry we will be judged by our proximity to hoarded wealth and so implicated in working class/lumpen exploitation/control and colonial violence. We worry that acknowledging capital differences in our movements would shatter otherwise comradely friendships across class. We worry that if we collectivise our capital, will have to be closer to the health risks, precarity and exploitation of the working class/lumpen. And, at worst, we worry that by making our access to capital apparent, working class/lumpen people we are in movements with will demand we collectivise it and so we will lose control over it to people whose competency we have been socialised to doubt.

Psychic and social energy is wasted ignoring and downplaying these class differences in social movements. Working class and lumpen people are disciplined by the middle class by threat of exclusion away from addressing this mal-distribution of wealth. This needs to be done to organise in a non-hierarchical way and build working class/lumpen power to direct revolutionary movements. People feel betrayed/enraged when their middle class comrades, whom they have organised for communism with, magic property out of the air with capital they didn't think to 'communise' with them, the class they are 'fighting' for.

This is justified by middle class radicals saying: everyone deserves a house/education/good health, that donating to 1000s of individual gofundmes won't stop the systems that produce inequality, and that I am not 'the real enemy,' the capitalist/the 1%. This is all true, but working class comrades continually forfeit these things by sharing what they have out of love and responsibility for their communities. So what is heard is: it is up to the poor to care for the poor, who have no claim over the resources of those who exploit and control them, the middle classes are not responsible to these care networks (which are not 'real' revolutionary work) and when it comes to how to use resources in movement networks, the privatised care of the middle classes is an unquestionable priority.

* On the better end, middle class radicals will use their inherited/excess capital to invest in a housing cooperative or worker cooperative; but, as Yaki Sayles said, this still fails to account for the middle class social structure that dominates social movements and is not a coherent plan for revolution.

As M.E. O'Brien writes in 'Family Abolition;' when socialist projects do not arise from struggles against the colonial ruling class they are largely compatible with capitalism. She cites socialist zionism and its kibbutz project of farms collectively run by settlers on Palestinian land. The beautiful European anti-zionist/anti-fascist Jewish class-struggle tradition, typified by the Jewish Labour Bund, was rerouted/pacified (after being near totally destroyed by Nazism) to serve the very racist colonial ruling class (white Christian society) that was oppressing them, in 'settler-communising' Palestinian land for European imperialism (not withstanding minority anti-zionist groups in the entity like Matzpen). Rather than socialist zionists giving up zionism and making their politics anti-colonial and routed in the aspiration of Palestinians (the 'new' working class on the land they were on) these collective farms became a racist lifestyle experiment integrated into the power structure around them.

The capitalists cannot be 'bought out' as a class. They can only be expropriated through mass social struggle. The retention of capital within urban (esp. white) middle class radical milieus, over and above using it to boost the fighting capacity/care networks of existing (multi-racial) working class/lumpen communities only serves to fragment and push out these communities. Sounds like some settler shit! The success of a housing or worker cooperative (or any revolutionary redistributive/reparations project) is decided by the extent to which it is determined by/directly benefits the working class/lumpen of the area in which it is based (in settler colonies, the Indigenous people) and the extent to which these cooperatives can extend and sustain the intensity of moments of mass insurgency.

When squats or land occupations (e.g. the ZAD - a 2010s autonomous zone that successful blocked an airport development near Nantes, France) sign treaties/legalise so as to no longer have to combat the state, they begin to professionalise/self-police (in COIN terms: transfer) and become dominated by the middle class (in the ZAD's case: permaculturists).

The prior definition of the PMC position (hostility toward the capitalist class and elitism toward the working class) plays out in the cooperative movement: we want to get rid of the capitalist class (easily/legally) but we don't want to actually do the work to include the working class.

COIN goes after the (feminised) care networks of aggrieved populations e.g. the repression of the U.S. Black Panther's Free Breakfast Programme (which also involved youth political education) to depoliticise them/reorganise them toward the state (patriarchy) e.g. the Panther's Free Breakfasts were incorporated into state welfare programmes after their insurgency was 'cleared.'

Language schools, mutual aid kitchens, communal money pots, community funding of national liberation struggles, networks of safe-houses for undocumented migrants, international reparations networks (remittances), anti-police conflict resolution/harm reduction/anti-violence organisers, sex worker to sex worker solidarity, politicised gangs and football ultras, inside/outside prisoner support, vigilante justice against exploitative bosses.

What if rather than retaining capital within the movement middle class, we recognise these mutual aid networks (without romanticising the above examples as harm-free utopias) as more multi-generational/autonomous from the state and durable than those of the social movement left and that they connect people (internationally!) with very low material stakes in the system together to meet their needs. If we disregard this as apolitical and disorganised, whilst not contributing our considerable resources to them, but to the class of 'radical' nonprofit managers above them, any 'alliance' we claim will be held with contempt.

WHAT DOES INSURGENT SOLIDARITY LOOK LIKE?

I. Defectors, double agents and reverse launderers frighten the state! 'Privileged allies' do not.

'Social war is . . . a way of understanding real class struggle and the campaign of violence carried out by state and capital, draped in law, conducted under the guise of peace . . . Capital and the state secure their power . . . along lines of race, gender, culture, sexuality, religion, and general notions of normality, orderliness, and acceptability - all of which intersect with . . . class war' (‘Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police,’ Mark Neocleous).

'Instead of reparations . . . Attacking and taking is . . . based in agency. Coming into direct conflict with and taking what we need and want from anti-Black groups and individuals builds up our confidence and comes from our own decisions . . . As we struggle alongside non-Black people, our proximity, mutual understanding, and common struggle offer us the possibility to move past the socialisations that create race [and] is a rare opportunity for honesty in a society that funnels people toward dishonest relations toward Blackness . . . When we move together in complicity, we bond over a shared goal, as opposed to guilt which only binds non-Black people further to their non-Blackness' ('Fragments Against Reparation: thoughts on anti-Blackness and Black liberation,' anonymous zine).

'If the so-called Anarchist “Black Bloc” of white youth [in the 2011 London anti-police riots] had joined with inner city Black kids, we may have had a general insurrection of long-standing and major damage to the state and capital. If an underground military force existed or a militia was assembled out of this united attack of Anarchists and Black youth, it could have entered the field of battle with more weaponry and advanced tactics. As it was, the gangs played that role in Los Angeles in 1992 and London in 2011, and played it very well' (‘Onward to the Black Revolution,’ Komboa Ervin).

'You wouldn’t find an accomplice resigning their agency, or capabilities as an act of “support.” They would find creative ways to weaponise their privilege (or more clearly, their rewards of being part of an oppressor class) as an expression of social war . . . Direct action is really the best and may be the only way to learn what it is to be an accomplice. We’re in a fight, so be ready for confrontation and consequence . . . Abolishing allyship can occur through the criminalisation of support and solidarity' (‘Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex,’ Indigenous Action Media).

Privilege and allyship is a discourse of the 'above' that attempts to reduce the violence of social war to the story of the professional class trying to better integrate itself and recover from a traumatic/racist history. It gets rid of the agency of the ruling class: that they own this system of racial capitalism open eyed to the fact it kills, the agency of the working class/lumpen that they are fighting in a war to eliminate this enemy to save their lives and the earth (and so ultimately everyone), and the agency of the middle class: that we must either choose to 'commit suicide as a class' (Cabral) or remain middle managers of those more oppressed than us.

Privilege is not a good thing. It dehumanises us, making us into pigs, bootlickers and scabs. As a Scottish 'Crips Against the Cuts' activist on Millennials Are Killing Capitalism said: (white) privilege is mafia logic: shoot one of your own to prove your loyalty to the club. When we are not needed they might kill us too (e.g. the zionist entity's mass 'hannibal' killing their own citizens in Oct '23). This is not something I want for anyone I love.

The solidarity that comes from foregrounding social war (rather than privilege or allyship) is insurgent rather than state preserving. In a social war we fight from, and against, our own location, to regain our own humanity (not to 'rescue' a romanticised/pitied 'other'). We fight a concrete enemy against whom elimination is the basic mode of conflict; and conspiratorily link this rebellion to other attacking forces, whom our liberation and needs are entangled with. We recognise the material obstacles and conflicts between us (the multi-racial non capitalist classes) and the manner by which they reproduce themselves, and attack and dismantle them as a matter of necessity. 'Not because we are good allies or because we want to check privileges . . . but because we are fucking revolutionaries and we have to' ('With Allies Like These: Reflections on Privilege Reductionism' anonymous zine).

* I propose we experiment with an insurgent solidarity and become defectors and double agents.

Double agents' conditional welcome within middle/capitalist class spaces (zones of whiteness/'civility') means they are in enemy territory, whose norms are a kind of psychological warfare designed to erode their accountability to anti-colonial working class/lumpen insurgency. A double agent is not confused as to where their home is and to whom they are loyal (not abstractly, but to real places and people) but they remain willing to deploy this 'welcome' to steal information and resources and discredit these spaces as illegitimate. Borrowing from Too Black and Rasul Mowat: the double agent sees 'privilege' as a 'legitimated' front that they have no attachment to, and reverse launders 'cleaned' capital/resources back towards criminalised/illegitimate activity. 'We should flip the bribes of the capitalist State and fund the anti-colonial, anti-imperial measures it so religiously outlaws.'

The middle class defector knows that their hostility toward the capitalist is only useful when they firmly switch loyalties and throw their weight behind the liberatory organising of multi-racial working class/lumpen where they live. Redistributing their capital, as well as risk, sacrifice, and the responsibility of attack.

Being a double agent and a defector involves conscious effort, long-term commitment and a thick skin. It will not look like waiting for the working class/lumpen to just 'come join' what we are doing already. It might look more like doing quiet feminised day-to-day care work, than spectacular clashes with the enemy. It might look more like imposing consequences on your middle class milieu, than trying to 'win' them over.

French settlers switching sides and joining the Algerian National Liberation Front (1950s), the white U.S. abolitionist John Brown's guerilla raid on Harpers Ferry to liberate arms to supply enslaved rebels (1859), the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta joining with the Egyptians in their uprising against the British (1882), son of a British military general/imperialist Faris Yahya learning Arabic/reverting to Islam and training with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (1970s), Nancy Cunard's (disinherited heir to Cunard cruise dynasty) anti-colonial propoganda work with pan-African revolutionaries such as George Padmore/joining front lines of the Spanish anti-fascist civil war as an anarchist (1930s/40s), Judy Bari organising with loggers to stop the clear cutting of old growth forests in North West Turtle Island (1980s/90s), communists in Denmark secretly robbing banks to fund Palestinian and Zimbabwean resistance (1980s/90s), the anarchist and anti-war veteran Aaron Bushnell's self immolation sacrifice in rage against U.S. participation in Palestinian genocide (2024), the Mexican EZLN leaving the city to the countryside and reformulating their vanguardist state-oriented maoism into an Indigenous/Mayan rooted anti-state socialism (1990s-).

These defectors were not perfect. They were not trying to be. They were trying to be accountable. They were revolutionaries who related to the anti-colonial working class as co-conspirators and agents, not through guilt and passivity. They were loyal to insurgency and refused look away from social war. Often they were disgraced within white civil society (which includes the mainstream left) in ableist and misogynistic terms. John Brown was portrayed as an insane religious zealot that put safety conscious Black people at risk in a 2020 HBO series, despite being described by Malcom X/El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz as the model for how white people should behave. Nancy Cunard smeared as a mentally fragile 'it girl' inserting herself in other people's struggles by the media/academia, whilst her death was mourned by communist luminaries globally (e.g. Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes).

We are not adrift and rudderless but strongly routed in the needs and aspirations of the oppressed' (David Gilbert). Rather than cling to the anxious security of the above, let us embrace the steadfast security of the below. Ground. Return to the source. Return home. 'Discover your humanity and love in revolution' (George Jackson).

II. 'on the inside the demonstration is an organism of care and support. on the outside it is ferocious and uncontrollable' (anonymous leaflet).

Taking cue from the Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas (a queer/trans lumpen anarchist collective): an insurgent solidarity prioritises militant confrontation with the capitalist class and an anti-patriarchal, anti-ableist care towards each other.

Without care we will not be able to withstand repression, our networks will not be durable over generations, and pig logic of misogyny and ableist disposability will invade our movements. This will lead to burn out, vulnerability to repression, a disillusionment in what we are fighting for, and distrust. And without militancy we will not be able to obstruct the operations of the capitalist class and their enforcers and defend ourselves and the revolutionary gains we make.

Militancy is the outward expression of care. And care is why and to what end we are militant. This mobious strip (completely connected, one turning into the other) acknowledges that not everyone will have the ability or disposition, or needs to be, a frontline fighter or 'visible' public organiser (typically 'celebrated' roles which cismen often gate-keep). We need: mediators, mediums, caretakers, linkers, builders, healers, storytellers (‘Organisation, Continuity, Community,’ Gelderloos) AND a practice/culture of active internal struggle to make sure all genders have what they need to take up any role. Militancy and care is a collective ethic that refuses attempts of the ruling class to split us, whether by disavowing confrontation and peace policing; or by making us complacent, apologetic for, and ill prepared for the (trans) misogyny and ableism that devours our movements. It is as important for the fighters to centre care, as it is for the healers to centre militancy.

Professionalism and wealth hoarding within movements is the antithesis of militancy and care: and groups that defend or rationalise or refuse to acknowledge either, especially against the efforts of their rank and file to do so, will have to be abandoned or opposed.

Building a militant and care-focused insurgent solidarity will likely involve:

1. Autonomous anti-colonial and working class/lumpen movements (e.g. the British Black Panther Party) supported by the radicalising middle class NOT mediated by the NPIC. E.g. the writer John Berger publicly giving his Booker Prize money to the British Black Panthers, whilst delegitimising Booker's McConnell's Caribbean sourced wealth as colonial theft/the 'art washing' of a racist.

2. Broader social movements with clear processes to build/defend working class/lumpen power, absent of which movements will continue to attract/be dominated by radicalising middle class people largely unaware of the class logic they have internalised. E.g. Tottenham Copwatch announcing in 2025 their non collaborationist stance on 'professional reformists' and asking opportunistic academics, career activists from NGOs, and progressive politicians to leave their movement. And the 2024 anti-management unionising efforts of Oakland California's Anti Police Terror Project's nonprofit staff ('our union will help guard against [the] harms [of the NPIC]').

3. Autonomous groups of middle class revolutionaries organising an offensive against professionalism and wealth hoarding within their own leftist milieus with accountability mechanisms to the working class/lumpen autonomous groups (e.g. Britain's Bristol Redistro project - a middle class fundraised money pot, separate from the NPIC, controlled by working class organisers to give direct to grassroots groups) with an understanding that this may well split the middle class activist scene.

It is true that right now masses of middle class revolutionaries entering into social relations with the working and lumpen class might be baffling at best and unwanted at worst. They would mostly be greeted with 'revolutionary' management, extraction, tokenism, and abandonment. But how would this change if we:

1. Practice/normalise transparency around access to capital in social movements and foster a culture of internal class struggle and redistribution.

2. If we come from the university or a nonprofit we do not to take peoples' knowledge and energy elsewhere but come as people (with more to learn than to teach, asking what is needed) having looted those places thoroughly.

3. Join a radical mutual aid project working in/rooted in working class and lumpen communities, or get a non-professional job that suits your skills/disposition, so as to form bonds outside of your milieu. Friendship/an openness to learning from working class people and a willingness to materially support the care networks they maintain is as important (and the latter will not work without the former) as spreading your revolutionary politics i.e. convincing all your co-workers to come to a union meeting.

4. When there are moments of autonomous self activity/insurgency e.g. riots, seek to support, participate in (this doesn't have to be at the same time/place), and celebrate them. Add to their force, do not drain it into an organisation outside the modes of organisation of the insurgency.

5. Take responsibility to learn about/be up front about the movement traditions from which your politics flow. Privilege and ally politics has taught us to either romanticise or infantilise working and lumpen class people/people of colour, and tokenise them as 'representatives' from a place of guilt. Engaging people seriously as equals, from a place of long term commitment and accountability, will mean our revolutionary politics, and any differences in opinion we might hold, will find more welcome.

6. To never exceptionalise ourselves as a class/race traitor or become arrogant. It is our responsibility to organise as many middle class people as possible towards an insurgent solidarity.

FAILED SOLIDARITY = FASCIST COIN COMES HOME TO ROOST

COIN is a dynamic/flexible spectrum of repression. From political re/dis-organising/psychological warfare (including middle class/white people) and overt military violence/blockading of the means of survival (for Global Majority/colonised/lumpen people). When the balance is overwhelmingly military ('because you can't separate the insurgents from the general population [and] you can't appoint a collaborator from the populace to do your bidding' - Callai) COIN expresses itself as fascism/genocide (which was always contained within it/within the logic of the state).

In Palestine and Tamil Eelam this is how COIN is expressed. Sri Lanka's 'Rajapaksa' model (Mahinda Rajapaksa was the genocidal prime minister of the Sri Lankan ousted by popular revolt in 2022) was that: [the Tamil national liberation insurgency must] 'be wiped out militarily and cannot be tackled politically,' and following Tufan Al-Aqsa (Oct’ 2023), the U.S. think tank 'The Investigative Project on Terrorism,' urged for the zionist entity to take up the Rajapaksa model (no negotiations/no ceasefire/critics can go to hell/regulate the media, to quote 4 of his 8 'principles') against Palestinian resistance.

Sivaram: '[my] contacts with Western intelligence and [western] counterinsurgency strategists . . . convinced [me] that Sri Lanka was becoming [a] laboratory for [the west's] COIN experiments.' This is said of Palestine too (Anthony Lowenstein's 'The Palestine Laboratory'). Sivaram's inclination was confirmed in 2011 when Rajapaksa's government held a summit (attended by 42 states including China - the co-sponsors, Canada, Israel, Italy, Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines, and Turkey) 'offer[ing Rajapaksa's] strategy . . . as a new model for defeating insurgencies' (Sri Lankan gov.).

Kilcullen, as the conference keynote, said: '[The Rajapaksa model] has led some to question the basic precepts of classical COIN theory [e.g.] David Galula . . . advocates protecting the population and political primacy as ways to win over the population, isolate the insurgents and forge a lasting peace. Sri Lanka chose a different path, in direct contradiction to these prescriptions, which seems to have produced quick and dramatic results.'

* The capitalists appear to no longer care about a 'soft-power/hearts and minds' COIN (even if these basic precepts were always already a 'myth' - colonel Benest) and are defunding/dismantling their own arms of population-centric/civilian COIN (in favour of/learning from fascistic military-centric COIN). So why critique the nonprofit industrial complex, progressive university departments, and middle class progressives when they are now openly hating and attacking these institutions/people?

Put simply: our politics learned from these institutions are useless. We have ignored and marginalised those with skills/wisdom in waging social war against the state and those who know how to practice care beyond the state. These are tools of resistance and survival we ALL desperately need to learn, and we will not learn them if we waste our time calling for a return of COIN soft-power (state-protecting 'progressive' civil society) and the modes of protest it has engendered. Even if this return were possible, the absence of these skills will only make us more vulnerable to fascism in the long-term.

To the white middle class fascism is new. But to the Global Majority fascists are colonisers turned outside in. Insurgent solidarity is turning to those who have been withstanding and beating them back for hundreds of years and throwing down like they do.

Additional reading/viewing