Yeah we all knew it wasn't gonna last, but it was still pretty cool and it set a precedent in a way.
It could've lasted but wouldn't really change much. As someone above mentioned they've had an anarchist autonomous zone in greece for decades and it's basically just a place for anarchists to go to look cool and the broader community hates it.
Chaz was great. A failure, but great. Critical support for the based people that started it and the issues they highlighted by doing it.
Numbers of people that understand socialism and anarchism in the locality only grew from it so I think you can regard it as a success for for the movement overall. The state smashed it of course but everyone knew that was going to happen from the start.
I'll be willing to change my views on its successes and failures when more on what exactly happened with the shooting is discovered. Seems fairly murky to me.
The state smashed it of course but everyone knew that was going to happen from the start.
looks at this thread Apparently not.
Anyone that thought defending an autonomous area with no structure, no organising, no local people's assembly or town halls was absolutely delusional.
If it had been organised, with a local resident's assembly that made resolutions for the area I might have given it 6-12 months of toleration by the state. But without forming its own structures to demonstrate local people's wishes they had no hope in hell of not getting crushed. Having an apparatus to demonstrate support and build the rules of the local area would have made crushing it significantly harder due to the optics of crushing something residents of an area are provably in favour of.
I mean, they'd still send in the cops to crush you as soon as you say "we're not paying taxes as we don't use any utilities and maintain our own roads" but it'd look ugly to a whole lot more people when there's a parallel local institution to draw objective numbers from in support of the policy being implemented.
Anyone that thought defending an autonomous area with no structure, no organising, no local people’s assembly or town halls was absolutely delusional.
I mean i don't disagree.
It all comes down to institutional power. The power of being able to demonstrate a mandate from the masses via parallel institutions is way more powerful than anything else. It is a weapon of political power.
There are other examples like Christiania in Copenhagen too that basically don't amount to anything other than a cool place to smoke weed.
It's not like anarchists don't have cadres. I don't think you can "hello, fellow anarchists" much farther than you can "hello, fellow maoists" - at least when it comes to groups doing direct action as opposed to larpers on Twitter.
The bigger problem is that the media doesn't give a damn about your street cred and will always glom on to finks.
Why couldn't it just have been called the autonomous district? It's such a shame. 😢 But I loved seeing what those comrades did ✊
They did though, the 3 demands were everywhere there:
-Defund SPD 50%
-No charges for protesters
-Invest in black and brown communities
It was incredibly hard to get the narrative out there when fox was screaming its head off and the respectable left was falling in line.
Started fizzling out after ambiguous reports of "black teenager fucking around in a car on the outskirts of CHAZ got shot by one of the CHAZ 'guards' there" (I've heard conflicting reports as to whether or not the car was stolen, whether he was driving it at someone or just driving in circles, etc. If someone knows more, please fill me in), hot on the heels of white nationalists trying to pull off drive-by shootings a day or two earlier. After that, it became pretty sparsely populated, letting cops come through at like, 4am and tear it all down.
The iconography of the cops using one of those giant street cleaner trucks to clean away chalk drawings at 5am is pretty on-brand though, I've gotta admit.
They intensely rejected the idea of hierarchy or structure and fell apart the second some black kids decided to do donuts nearby. It's almost as if structure is necessary to accomplish literally anything 🤔
This is talking about businesses and nonprofits etc l existing within the capitalist system lol. If that's what you want to be, that's fine. You can literally do that right now. If you want to actually challenge the system you need structure and hierarchy. All of the least unsuccessful anarchists have understood this, and literally everyone else in the world understands it.
Hearsay but someone on GenZedong mentioned going to one of the earlier meetings and then leaving after someone got booed out for just saying the word "hierarchy" without any negative qualifiers.
And that is ABSOLUTELY the reason it fell apart, not being fucking besieged literally every fucking night by riot police and/or chuds. That only happens to muh organized ML projects
You realize that those are inevitable conditions for a dissident project, right? Like what good is your project if it can't withstand expected attacks? Do you think there will ever be a time that the police wouldn't fuck with you and then you could be successful? The idea behind having a structured apparatus is that it can better withstand those outside pressures.
"CHAZ was bad because it wasn't structured so it was inevitable that the police will crush them"
Well there's a lot of anarchist projects that aren't structured into coercive hierarchies and have been withstanding police pressure for fuckling decades (like i don't even know if CHAZ was anarchist and you're basing that on a fucking reddit comment).
"Yeah, but those are just fucking posers who don't do anything meaningful against capital, just want to look cool (except you know for example being in the fucking frontline of anticapitalist protests for decades and basically being the only reason that there are leftist movements in some parts of Europe)"
Seriously, i fucking love that this site is all "Left unity this, left unity that" and then the usual 4-5 people do this disgusting completely obvious sectarian agenda pushing and people are stiull buying this. Like okay, fucking protect China if you want, i'm actually seeing that issue much more nuanced because there are few people who do actual analysis of it, but then comes this shit, dismissing fucking decade old movements as being irrelevant because they don't singlehandedly solve the whole housing crisis in Spain or Greece is ridiculous.
