Insurgent Survival
:Reflections on the Fight Against Sweeps Targeting the Homeless in Austin, Texas
In 2019, militants in Austin, Texas started an organization with the aim of defending homeless camps against sweeps—forced removals disguised as “cleanups” carried out by cops and work crews. This organization, Stop the Sweeps, intervened in a cycle of struggles that included the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, and the winter storm of 2021 while attempting to consolidate a pole for confrontational activity and strategic thinking. Here, we explore the history of this movement in detail, seeking to distill lessons about autonomous organization that can aid revolutionaries in future struggles against dispossession.
In June 2019, Austin City Council passed a reform legalizing “camping,” taking away the tool of misdemeanor ticketing from the Austin Police Department, which had used it for two decades to push homeless encampments into the deep woods and routinely dispossess the residents. The NGO left promoted this as a dramatic advance in the civil rights of houseless people, while NextDoor reactionaries decried it as a sign of the debasement of the once great city of Austin. In the news and on Twitter, Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott exchanged barbs with Democratic Austin Mayor Steve Adler, each taking one of these sides.
The following November, friends and comrades formed Stop the Sweeps Austin (STS), a political intervention intended to undermine both of those positions. The core aim of STS was to show that both the progressive city and the reactionary state used similar techniques, rationales, and low-wage contractors guarded by police to systematically dispossess the poorest and most marginalized people in Austin—and that in doing so, they were continuing policies of displacement that had begun more than a century earlier with colonization and the policing of enslaved and formerly enslaved populations. Confronting the sweeps was both materially and discursively strategic. The idea was to cut away at the foundation of the post-decriminalization strategy for displacement, heightening antagonism towards both of the political factions that depended upon it.
To do this, Stop the Sweeps Austin rallied sympathizers to intervene against weekly encampment sweeps by city and state forces while building parallel networks of mutual aid and political support. STS drew on existing solidarity networks descended from decades-running projects, informed by the living memory of the social movements of the homeless in the 1980s. We also benefitted from historical research and movement elder storytelling to extend our understanding of local history to the founding of Austin.
We now recognize that we were a part of a national movement against sweeps that peaked early in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on the momentum of the George Floyd Uprising. Autonomous groups in California, including the Sacramento Homeless Union and Where Do We Go in Berkeley, had been organizing against sweeps through 2019. In an early phase of STS organizing, we were roped into coalition building and national legal work by the Western Regional Advocacy Project; yet these projects did not offer meaningful coordination between groups to advance an autonomous vision grounded in direct action. There were efforts in Los Angeles to build out anti-sweep programs that seemed similar to ours from afar, though they started from a stronger orientation towards social democratic city politics. Fiercer resistance in Minneapolis built to flashpoints in 2020 including the occupation of an empty hotel and militant encampment defense. The circulation of the insurrectionary framework “You Sweep, We Strike” saw attacks on contractors and city infrastructure in Seattle, Santa Cruz, and Minneapolis. It was difficult to connect with these projects to learn from them directly, but easy to boost each other’s content from afar.
Five years after the founding of Stop the Sweeps Austin and two years after its quiet dissolution, we are writing this piece in hopes of refining the lessons of this recent high point of movement activity. We will begin by painting a picture of the moment in 2019 when Stop the Sweeps emerged, then situate that moment in a longer history of colonization, development, and homeless resistance. Having done so, we will distill the strategic frameworks that guided our organizing, then follow the trajectory of the movement to the limits it encountered. In each section, we will present our hypotheses and the lessons we learned along the way, illustrated via specific practical experiences.
We offer these as reflections both for the local movement—to remind it of its history, its victories and defeats—and for revolutionaries everywhere seeking to think through crucial questions about autonomous organization. Today, we are preparing to confront a new phase of camp repression in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Grants Pass” decision, which green-lights criminalization and displacement in California and elsewhere.
A sign on a tent in downtown Austin.
1000 Tents Bloom
Before 2019, most encampments lasted about three months before police evicted them—a cycle of temporary inhabitation and dispersal. This constant motion is essential to the cycle of development, as it opens up land and keeps bodies moving through the various infrastructures built to profit on them—shelters, social services, housing, prisons, hotels, and stores, all of which increasingly resemble each other.
Though “camping” was formally legalized in June 2019, enforcement had actually ceased during the winter of 2018-2019. Citing a paucity of funds due to the consequences of the catastrophic Hurricane Harvey in southeast Texas, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) paused its contracts providing camp removal, attempting to hand them off to the City of Austin. The city government did not immediately pick up the contracts at the same pace. At the same time, informal directives were given to APD to slow the pace at which they inflicted tickets for camping, fearing court rulings enforcing an expansion of the Martin v. Boise circuit court ruling, which had slowed camping ban enforcement on the West Coast. This occurred alongside a soft strike by organized Austin Police officers who had significantly slowed their response times to minor crimes, aiming thereby to press their demands for more power.
The repeal of the camping ban created a political opening, enabling the camps to survive indefinitely on public land. Tent cities blossomed in January and February, mainly under state-owned freeways, and grew more elaborate. Shanty towns and shelters made from wooden pallets, political signs, and tarps as well as more modest tents and cardboard populated the city north to south and east to west, dotting the parks and the underpasses of major highways and appearing beside libraries and around the social services buildings downtown. This offered new forms of collective stability and security for the unhoused: the camps served as points of connection, stable locations at which to receive social services, and places for those new to life on the streets to get oriented and find support. They represented a strategy for mutual safety against harassment by reactionaries and police, providing a sense of collective life and care.
An encampment below the I-35 overpass in the heart of downtown Austin.
This occupation of space shocked liberals and conservatives alike, many of whom saw it as a display of public disorder or an embodiment of the ever-intensifying crisis in affordable housing. In Stop the Sweeps, for our part, we saw the expansion of the camps as a sign of the self-organizing capacity of the homeless and a demonstration of the power of land occupation—indeed, a signal of disorder for those invested in the property system. STS sought to build connections centering this sense of self-organization to build a defense network against the waves of displacement that were the cause and consequence of life in the camps.
At that time, the displacement of the housed poor had continued unabated across Austin for decades, in keeping with national trends and local plans to develop and gentrify first West Austin and then East Austin, which was historically home to Black and brown Austinites following a century of segregation. Recent statistics show that most homeless Austinites were displaced from the zip codes that they currently reside in, often in areas suffering intense gentrification. While most recent literature on rising rents in Austin focuses on the spike following the pandemic, money had been pouring into Austin neighborhoods long before that, aided by historically low interest rates intended to flip houses and entire blocks into money makers. Projects that had been paused since the previous real estate bubble burst in 2008 were resumed during the 2010s with towers and “luxury” apartment blocks mushrooming from the mycelial networks of capital and property that had accumulated and expanded during the “bust” period.
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In the late 2010s, the local Maoist movement (now mostly disbanded and critiqued as a cult by former members) waged a years-long struggle against a development slated along East Riverside, an effort to reinvent a low-income area as a luxury new-urbanist hotspot: the Domain on Riverside. The developers ultimately succeeded in evicting low-income renters from multiple high-density apartment complexes, which consequently remained boarded up for years just a short walk away from one of the largest encampments on that avenue.
These Maoists represented a political pole in 2019 Austin, offering a mixture of public and secretive activity that prioritized direct action and confrontation with a diffuse array of enemies that they saw as aligned with the interests of capital. On the one hand, this meant that developers were confronted in public meetings and at their homes, and on the other, that former allies were castigated online and in person after political breaks. The Maoists also confronted other minor political figures, including DSA-oriented candidates, and disrupted their meetings. At the time, the Maoists had developed a reputation for being arrested, both at marches and in their homes, and facing elevated charges. Their former leader, Jared Roark, who went by the name Dallas, was arrested in his home for weapons possession after a tragicomic confrontation with an expelled former member of the Maoist’s armed unit.
The DSA and an array of activist non-profits oriented towards electoral and council-level reforms represented another pole of activity. While less active in the streets, this alliance fused respectable political activity—rallies, press conferences, and testimony at City Council—with flirtations with abolitionist frameworks. The Homes Not Handcuffs coalition emerged out of this scene; they won the 2019 camping ban rollback, spawned the autonomous mutual aid organization Street Forum, and recomposed briefly to defend the camping ban at the polls in 2021. Their organizing relied heavily on personal relationships with City Council “progressive” heavyweight and current Texas Representative Greg Casar and on a progressive political machine comprised of organizations like Grassroots Leadership and Workers Defense Project, which had won reforms at similar scales through the City Council in the 2010s.
STS oriented ourselves by drawing from political traditions and organizations that overlapped with these but were distinct from them. Many of the initial organizers were drawn from the local anarchist milieu, which had been working to draw links between different tendencies and organizations. One was the Peaceful Streets Project, which had emerged from right libertarian circles amidst the Occupy Wall Street cycle at the end of 2011, but had split left in the course of a decade of anti-police struggle. PSP served as the local Copwatch, filming police interactions and developing an aggressive interventionist style in which they named and shamed local cops, occasionally becoming personally known to the police themselves.
Another influence were members of the Autonomous Student Network, who had cut their teeth organizing at the University of Texas and had gone on to participate in the Peaceful Streets Project and the Occupy ICE movement that established an occupation outside a detention center in San Antonio; they also helped to start Street Forum. These organizers brought an experimental streak to organizing, with a willingness to take risks and say what only anarchists can say.
Contributing historical memory and serving an organic link to Austin’s homeless movement were members of The Challenger Street Newspaper, also born in 2011 out of the ashes of The Advocate, a long-running more traditionally NGO-style paper. From its beginnings, The Challenger was smaller and scrappier than the Advocate, with more will to participate politically in social movements. The Challenger published monthly issues with articles written mainly by homeless people in Austin, focusing on life on the streets of Austin, political commentary, poetry, and art. The Challenger had resuscitated the memory of Homer the Homeless Goose, the mascot of the Street People’s Advisory Council—a direct action organization of homeless Austinites in the 1980s who led occupations of vacant buildings and, famously, the downtown lake.
Along with contributions from other early members involved in anti-prison struggles and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the DSA (which was focused on mutual aid), these organizations helped build the political framework that STS used as we attempted to build an alternative pole, intervening in the fight to defend the camps. This enabled us to synthesize tactics and strategic insights from a variety of experiences. Coupled with insatiable demands and a hostile attitude to the state, that equipped us to punch above our weight.
A History of Displacement and Contestation
Now that we have set the stage in 2019, let’s back up to explore the history of homelessness in Austin and the movements combating it.
The City of Austin was established as a military maneuver intended to project burgeoning Anglophone power westward after Texan independence from Mexico in 1836. Settlers established a semicircle of forts to the west to defend the new capital from raiding Comanches and other Indigenous people. Austin’s famed Barton Springs are part of a chain of springs in Central Texas that had been in continuous use by Indigenous peoples for over 10,000 years; they appear in some Texas rock art. Military campaigns and raiding and surveying parties sought to drive Indigenous peoples from their lands throughout Texas. The city’s first camping ban excluded Indigenous peoples from camping inside city limits.
Slavery was an integral part of the economy of early Austin, with up to a third of its earliest recorded population comprised of enslaved Black people. White people who enslaved twenty people or more were known as “planters” and held special status. As a consequence of the boom-and-bust cycles of for-profit agriculture, planters often enslaved more people than they could put to work on the plantations that ringed the city. Consequently, many enslaved people worked and lived in the city instead of on plantations. They provided various urban services, remitting a percentage of their income to their enslavers.
Some elements of the ruling classes sought to target these Black people who were enslaved but living somewhat independently. They formed Vigilance Committees of private citizens to maintain white power in the districts where these people lived. Later, they demanded the establishment of a municipal police force so that the public would have to pay for the policing of Black people. This was one of the origins of what became the APD.
Another famously followed the Civil War some years later. With slavery abolished and the fighting over, freedmen and former Confederate soldiers arrived in the city alongside other poor whites. Black freedmen established communities—sometimes permitted on private land, but often squatting near creeks and in other undesirable or far-flung areas of town. To discipline these surplus populations, the city government proposed a police force. The Black Codes forced Black people who did not find employment to labor in conditions resembling slavery. Black work crews assembled that way played a major role in constructing Austin’s State Capitol.
Alongside the police, a series of city plans served to structure the racial order of the city. Following the official decree of segregation in 1928, slums comprising over ten percent of the town’s area were evicted. People who were renting or who did not have clear title to the land where they resided were displaced en masse through these “Slum Clearance Plans” and federally funded Urban Renewal programs, and the land was often turned over to state use (including the sites of the University of Texas, the state government, and the hospitals between Congress and the I-35 Freeway). These displacements served to impose a line between a Black and brown East Austin and a white West Austin. This segregationist project shaped the messy post-emancipation reality of scattered Freedmen’s towns and Mexican enclaves over the following 80 years.
According to Gus Bova, in the 1970s and 1980s, subsidized housing fell out of favor alongside a generalized crisis in manufacturing work. Across the country, people were being thrown out of industrial work while cheap housing was disappearing, and Austin was no exception. The local booms and busts in the housing construction market, which employed low-wage labor, contributed to this. Federal policy also began to support housing as a collateralized asset, both for big banks and consumers, seeing a hot real estate market as a sign of a healthy economy that bolsters consumer spending and debt. Periodically, this policy gets ahead of itself, spawning crises like the one in 2008—but even at the best of times, it inexorably raises housing costs for everyone while concentrating property in the hands of fewer and fewer landlords.
The city’s “Innovation Team” traces the beginning of NGO work intended to benefit the homeless to 1966, citing a charity’s pamphlet offering services to “transients” and “non-residents.” Bova and the “Innovation Team” both point to 1985 as a watershed year in which the city set up the first of many task forces to fight homelessness. Bova concludes that by 1985, the accumulation of crises in employment and housing had produced considerable homelessness in Austin.
Not long after, the Street People’s Advisory Council (SPAC) formed, bringing together rebels from the Task Force with politicized homeless people. Drawing lessons from actions against the Vietnam War, these activists purchased a goose which they publicly threatened to kill and eat, after first considering a swan donated to the city by a member of the local elite. After the goose drew the attention of an outrage-hungry press, they pardoned the goose and named him Homer. Homer and his human compatriots went on to lead occupation marches on abandoned buildings and the flotilla occupation of Town Lake.
The SPAC and Homer captured headlines, hearts, and minds for several years, helping to generate an activist milieu that included the Mad Housers (a collective of builders that constructed mobile shelters and the flotilla rafts that were used to occupy the lake) and the Blackland CDC (a neighborhood organization which co-organized the occupation of vacant houses being demolished by the University of Texas in east Austin). They operated as a part of nationwide movements, joining organizations like the National Homeless Union, the Houston Homeless Union, and others in coordinated campaigns, including one dedicated to takeovers of vacant housing.
They won some reforms, including increased shelter funding, the dedication of vacant housing to serve as transitional housing, and a decades-long detente on UT development of the Eastside; but the SPAC campaign was ultimately repressed. The APD consistently hounded the organizers; allegedly, so did other homeless people, and “animal rights” activists concerned for the well-being of the adventurous Homer. City officials played a role in repressing the flotilla protest, changing a “night-fishing” ordinance that allowed the legal occupation of the lake to create new restrictions that made it possible to seize the boats. Nonetheless, the story of Homer and the SPAC and their direct action served as inspiration for activists from the Challenger Street Newspaper to launch several efforts of their own throughout the 2010s.
The next major cycle of struggle emerged in response to Austin’s camping ban in the mid-1990s. Research by Gus Bova locates the impetus for the camping ban in activism by the Downtown Austin Alliance (DAA), a consortium of downtown business and land owners. According to Bova, the DAA was incorporated as a Business Improvement District, a quasi-governmental organization to which businesses pay special taxes to fund private security and political activity. Their first move was to organize “Downtown Rangers” who biked around downtown harassing homeless people and acting as the DAA’s private arm of the Austin Police Department, which supervised them.
Austinites protest the camping ban proposal at City Hall in 1996.
The DAA also began to organize for a camping ban, picking up model legislation from the American Association for Rights and Responsibilities—which shared white nationalist co-founder John Tanton with the anti-immigrant group Federation for American Immigration Reform. Though the ban passed easily in 1996, its passage led to a brief wave of campouts by housed people in protest. A year later, the city council was preparing to repeal it, as it had only served to shuffle people from place to place in the city and deeper into the woods. Amid pressure from the DAA, the council led by then Mayor Kirk Watson “compromised,” keeping the ban but establishing homeless services in downtown Austin. This led to the establishment of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH), which served as an anchor for similar services in the area. It also illustrates the connection between homeless services and policies that police and harm their clientele.
In addition to the camping ban, city police and administrators used their powers to harass homeless people and encampment communities. One example is captured vividly in the 1995 documentary Bouldin Creek Greenbelt Family, filmed by camp residents themselves as well as housed cable access volunteers. The film chronicles the daily life and communal practices of the camp, including a scene in which the residents grill burgers for more than a dozen people for dinner time. This pastoral peace is disrupted by cops on horseback who bark orders at the residents to vacate before sending heavy machinery to destroy their property and territory. The family is scattered about town with whatever possessions they can carry.
These practices of harassment and disruption met an opponent in the late 1990s in Leslie Cochran, a gender-defying homeless resident who, encountering repression upon moving to town, became a one-man army agitating against the police. Leslie’s crusade—which included city council appearances, elaborately painted signs protesting his treatment by APD, and a run for mayor—put him front and center in the popular imagination of Austin in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His legacy is complicated. His nonlinear, playful relationship with gender made him the butt of jokes about trans people and a celebrated spectacle of the Austin Weird. Many people forget that around his much gawked-at thong, his ass was often painted “Kiss this, APD.”
Alongside Leslie and the camping ban campout, other homeless organizing lacked the thread of direct action and independence that had characterized the SPAC. One such campaign was House the Homeless, established by legal aid worker Richard Troxell. Troxell took credit for creating the concept of the police Winnebago in Philly, and for the one-hour health exemption to the no-sit no-lie ordinance that followed the DAA’s campaign for the camping ban. Troxell, to his credit, acknowledged the roles of both the wage system and the police in creating and perpetuating homelessness, but followed these ideas into increasingly wonkish policy proposals. Also on the scene was the Austin Advocate, which successfully organized the first street newspaper with homeless vendors, including Leslie, staged prominently around Austin. While the Advocate relied heavily on these vendors, the vendors had little role in the writing or publishing process.
A split in the last months of the Advocate led Val Romness, a longtime producer of homeless media involved in the Austin Cable Access scene that released “Bouldin Creek Greenbelt Family,” to establish the Challenger in early 2011 with Advocate vendor Fred Pettit after the Advocate had ceased meaningful production. The Challenger began operations without nonprofit status or funding, operating more horizontally, though helmed consistently by Romness. This openness, along with creative participation by local anarchists, led to increased ties between the paper and radical milieus, with early collaborations with Monkeywrench Books, Austin Anarchist Study Group members, Treasure City Thrift, and remnants of the then-dissipating Rhizome Collective. In late 2011, these relationships helped to foster the Challenger’s intervention in the local iteration of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.
When the revolutionary wave that took shape in Tunisia and spread to Tahrir Square in Egypt reached Austin in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the results were mixed. The first General Assemblies were announced by a distinctly Austin mixture of white yogis and libertarians, who hoped for a non-confrontational interpretation of “Occupy.” In contrast to the tent encampments popping up in other cities, they proposed a 24-hour protest at Austin City Hall with sleeping quarters in an electric taxi warehouse several miles away. The ad-hoc leaders cited the camping ban as the main reason they chose this tack, not wanting to break the law and burn bridges with the police, whom they regarded as part of the “99%.”
Challenger Newspaper members saw themselves as a part of this eclectic upswell of the downwardly mobile and called for an alternative encampment called Tent City across the river from City Hall to bring attention to their own issues, including the 1%-driven camping ban. Organizers attempted to rally support from Occupy Austin (OA) participants for a sunset confrontation with police, but APD moved in early, dispersing the camp before it could gather steam. Tent City organizers and anarchists relocated the tents to City Hall and set them up, confronting several more conservative members of OA. Tent City and the Challenger made a bold claim for autonomous action early on with the support of an OWS founder, the late, great David Graeber, who was in town visiting his girlfriend and happened to save a toddler occupant from an overzealous opponent of the tents.
Through shrewd maneuvering and the opposition of a roused crowd, the ones with the tents won a standoff with APD, establishing precedent for a more robust occupation and the participation of the homeless movement. As the occupation wore on, more and more of those in the occupation at City Hall were homeless, sleeping at the site overnight, though usually on the limestone stairs rather than setting up more tents. This led to tensions within the Occupy Austin movement, as some participants grumbled that their movement had been “coopted” by the poor. Against this tendency, and alongside organizing by participants of color, a more radical streak emerged, making space for a diverse array of voices and actions. The “anniversary” event in 2012 was led by Challenger/Tent City-oriented occupiers. The Challenger had moved its weekly meetings to the occupation and was organizing within it through the Ending Homelessness Working Group (EHWG). On the first birthday of Occupy Austin, the EHWG, the OA General Assembly, and the Challenger called for a march on the City-owned vacant Home Depot building with the intention of occupying it, taking inspiration from OWS and Occupy Oakland.
The march on the Home Depot was unsuccessful, but led to several other attempts to occupy other vacant lots around Austin. Homeless occupiers established a camp, also called Tent City, in South Austin, which focused mostly on recreating daily camp life rather than advancing political conflict. Though it was intended as an experiment, the camp hosted a small group of members mostly focused on avoiding the cops, not unlike other camps. It gradually disbanded after several evictions, without the sort of flashpoint of camp defense that might have re-politicized it. Its fizzling led to questions about what sort of organizational capacity successful camp defense would require, questions later consciously taken up by Stop the Sweeps Austin.
Tents line the trail along the Colorado River on the south edge of downtown Austin.
Surrounding the City from Below
From 2019-2022, the camps that surrounded and besieged the Capitol practiced an ungoverned and unregulated form of life that violated the order of capital. Recognizing the camps as forms of insurgent self-organization on the part of the dispossessed, we sought to defend them and expand their potential in the face of attacks from a wide array of political forces. This runs counter to the logic of specialization and legibility that typically characterizes activist campaigns, which often aim to represent the dispossessed as a distinct constituency (“the homeless”) through demands and negotiation on the terrain of policy, recruiting to an organization to negotiate on their behalf, and cultivating a specialized minority of “directly-impacted” activists. Instead, we emphasized the defense, generalization, and expansion of forms of insurgent self-organization that are illegible to politicians, social service providers, and activists alike. Where much of the NGO left saw a lack of organization, demands, interests, and representatives, we saw an abundance of potential in the camps themselves.
We did not romanticize camps as the revolutionary communes-to-come. Different camps had different cultures and different levels of cohesion. In some camps, people took lots of responsibility for each other, checking in to ensure others were fed, warm, and healthy, with those taking responsibility for assisting others and mediating conflicts forming an organic leadership. In other cases, big personalities declared themselves leaders, with mixed reactions from other residents ranging from dismissiveness to outright hostility. Some camps’ internal dynamics were defined by competition and hostility, with fights and thefts common as people merely tolerated living alongside each other. People would often move between camps as a consequence of conflicts with other residents or as a means to seek different conditions in regards to drug use, fights, noise, pests, or other issues. Recognizing the camps as self-organized phenomena means taking all these contradictory realities into account while still affirming the self-activity at their core as a response to a shared condition of dispossession.
Whatever the internal dynamics of each camp, their occupation of public space constituted an attack on the logic of property and capitalist development. Land belonging to the city or state government was taken over by forms of organization beyond their control and put to unauthorized and unregulated uses. While privately held property was never directly taken over, the public presence of the dispossessed rendered class conflict explicit and impeded development. The proliferation of camps in close proximity to sites of commerce or luxury apartments made these places less appealing to the comparatively wealthy, who complained about the numerous signs of the dispossessed living their lives in public—including accumulated survival supplies, the buildup of waste from humans living without infrastructure, and public expressions of mental and emotional crisis and other things that those with houses have the luxury of doing in private. A public homeless population coming into contact with students, tourists, consumers, and investors threatened to make Austin an unattractive location for new festivals, conferences, companies, and residents.
The proliferation of camps from 2019 to 2022 was an impediment to development and gentrification in Austin, alongside and overlapping with system-wide shocks including the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic downturn, and the George Floyd Rebellion. While the camps are sources of power that impact the political and economic terrain around them, they are not properly political: they do not make demands, they are not legible forms of organization or constituents that can be represented. In recent years, others have used the term ante-political to refer to forces that precede or exceed the traditional sphere of politics. This framework helps us understand the power of the camps and the nature of the political attack on them.
The attack on the camps and on the unhoused in general was carried out according to two distinct logics of governance. One is outright exterminationist, its aim being to socially cleanse undesirable populations by dispersing the camps and driving people out of town or into jail cells. The other is managerial, the aim being to regulate the homeless and precarious through services and facilities administered by the state, social service providers, or private and non-profit landlords. The former attacks the camps for simply existing; the latter aims to subjugate their ungoverned activity to managed and profitable social services. Both attack them for violating capitalist order. The same institutions can make use of both logics, like when Governor Greg Abbott opened a Texas Department of Transportation parking lot—now known as Camp Esperanza—as a “shelter” to regulate the homeless and legitimize his sweeps, or when the city government used sweeps to enforce the newly reinstated camping ban in 2022.
The mainstream movement to repeal the camping ban framed the struggle as a conflict between conservatives and progressives: Greg Abbott and the reactionaries of Take Back Austin on one side, Austin’s social movements, city council, and social service providers on the other. This battle was encapsulated in the ongoing Twitter war between Abbott and Adler over the camping ban repeal. In reality, both the state and city governments depended on the sweeps to manage homelessness, only according to distinct logics. Before the repeal of the camping ban, the city government had been sporadically using sweeps to clear camps, and they kept their own sweep schedule parallel to the state government’s sweeps under the highways. When sweeps resumed after pausing for the pandemic, the city government had taken over all of the sweeps from the State. This shared dependence was most explicitly laid bare when the city government swept the ARCH camp the same day the state government began its sweeps of the highways.
Re-framing the camps as an ante-political insurgent force can give us a clearer picture of the competing forces that aim to attack this form of insurgency, enabling us to move away from some of the limitations of activist frameworks. Reformist activist approaches can lead us into the trap of allying with the managerial logic of governance in the name of pragmatism, as seen in groups like The Other Ones Foundation (TOOF), Austin Mutual Aid (AMA), and Little Petal Alliance (LPA). More radical activist approaches can end up fetishizing the thinking and activity of the activists themselves, creating organizations that exist for no sake but to reproduce themselves or insular scenes that become disconnected from any material force. Rejecting both of these errors, we believe that focusing on our relationship to existing forms of insurgent self-organization can provide a counterweight to both reformist managerialism and radical impotence.
While Stop the Sweeps used activist tactics, we did so while understanding the insurgency of the camps as primary, rather than our own activity. Faced with the practical question of how to join forces with the camps and mount a defense against sweeps, we recruited and mobilized from within activist milieus, and we used activist tactics such as creating media, pushing limited demands (but not policy), rallies, home and office demos, and call-ins as part of campaigns against specific targets. Similarly, after Abbott opened what eventually became Camp Esperanza, we maintained an early presence to build relationships, trace the fault lines, and conspire with the residents to undermine this new form of management. When the COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis, we participated in shaping the camp support infrastructure that filled this gap, temporarily helping sustain the camps while developing new forms of collaboration with them. But we did so with a determination to bolster the defense of the camps, not seeing these things as ends in themselves, nor claiming to “organize” the homeless or integrate the camps or their residents into the terrain of political representation.
Now, on the other side of this movement arc, we feel it is important to re-articulate this position, which may have been forgotten amid the frenzy of service-oriented mutual aid, activist infighting, and reacting to our enemies’ offensives.
Governor Greg Abbott, scumbag.
Asymmetrical Conflict against the Infrastructure of Oppression
Informed by the tactical sensibility emerging through the last two decades of struggle—the port shutdowns during Occupy, the highway takeovers during Black Lives Matter protests, the targeting of ICE and prison contractors, and other struggles that we have participated in or learned from—Stop the Sweeps understood power as a question of infrastructure and logistics. Decision-making bodies are largely empty political theaters carrying out the will of dominant social forces—be those reactionary populist movements or factions of capitalists, non-profits, or police. Their emptiness makes demonstrations at the well-guarded halls of power ineffectual. The real power in this world is in the infrastructure that is used to administer and maintain this civilization; a decision to carry out sweeps can only be enforced if there are workers, trucks, and money that can be mobilized to that purpose. Infrastructures can be vulnerable to pressure, and this makes it a strategic site for potential pressure and direct action.
We understood that City Hall and Abbott would never willingly stop the sweeps. Instead, once the state government started conducting sweeps in November 2019, we paid attention to who was conducting them. The sweeps were carried out by a work crew driving a few contractor trucks and overseen by a couple supervisors directly from the Texas Department of Transportation. The police were not actively removing people’s belongings; they served as a passive backup force that intervened only to suppress unrest or resistance. They were largely hands-off with us, allowing us to be in the camps as we filmed, harassed the work crew, and talked to residents. We noticed the same dynamic when the Austin Public Works Department carried out sweeps in November 2019 along other public easements with a different contractor’s name on the truck.
A group of contract workers throw away belongings at a sweep under a highway overpass.
Digging through city and state contracts, we traced a whole web of contractors. We discovered that the city and state both contracted through WorkQuest, a central contracting agency offering services and products and employing disabled people. WorkQuest, in turn, contracted out to other agencies: EPSI for the state sweeps and Relief Enterprises for the city sweeps. Sometimes these subcontractors also recruited labor from temporary staffing agencies like Pacesetters or received people doing “community service” through Downtown Austin Community Court. Sometimes the work crews themselves consisted of other homeless people, though some we met ended up leaving because they couldn’t stand to participate in oppressing other people in the same position as them.
Once we uncovered the contractors, we saw the WorkQuest contract as a strategic vulnerability. Our theory was that if there was enough pressure to make contractors back out or make the sweeps more costly, it would diminish the political will to carry them out. We hoped that if WorkQuest dropped out, it would impair both the City and State from doing sweeps. We identified the phone numbers of WorkQuest employees, the locations of offices, and the addresses of executives; we used these for targeted phone zaps, a home demo, and a guerrilla fliering action at the WorkQuest store. This strategy draws a lot from the “tertiary targeting” model used in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign and more recently in the Stop Cop City movement. While the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted our focus on WorkQuest, we learned months afterwards that they had dropped the contract in March 2020 due to our pressure.
Unfortunately, WorkQuest dropping the contract did not stop the sweeps. As the city government took over the sweeps in the fall of 2020, WorkQuest passed off the contract directly to Relief Enterprises; we had only removed the middleman. Relief Enterprises had fewer physical sites to target; we had little luck finding a truck lot where we could mobilize a blockade or some other collective action. The few locations we did find appeared to be shared with other businesses in industrial parks, and the vehicles appeared to be dispersed between a few sites rather than concentrated in a single lot. Much of our energy targeting them was directed into call-in campaigns to City Hall when their contract came up for renewal, or car demos targeting the Mayor and City Council members. Beyond the car demos, we lacked effective ways to mobilize groups of people offensively during the height of the pandemic, and our energy was tied up in other initiatives like the camp support network.
From 2020 to 2022, we succeeded in using these methods to win concessions that softened the sweeps. The authorities let people keep their tents and belongings, permitting them to name what was and was not trash and to remain in their camps during the sweeps; the City tried to frame them as progressive “clean-ups” to appease critics. While they continued throw away furniture, mattresses, structures, and temporarily unattended belongings—and we continued to push back on each of those fronts—these sweeps were a far cry from the early Texas Department of Transportation sweeps that forced people to move all their belongings across the highway or lose everything.
All these advances were undone when Prop B, a reactionary referendum initiative spearheaded by local anti-homeless forces with Save Austin Now, reinstated the camping ban and the sweeps returned as a force of devastating displacement. Since we had tied up so much of our energy in pressuring City Council alongside initiatives like the camp support network, we had not built up the forces we needed to take the fight directly to the sweeps infrastructure once the political terrain was closed off to us. By the time Prop B came down, the movement was already declining, and it was too late to reorient towards a new strategic framework. When we got started, we had been critical of Homes Not Handcuffs for only pushing the policy front without building the capacity to defend that victory against the inevitable reactionary backlash. In our pursuit of political leverage on the sweeps contract, we fell into a similar trap: we had not built up the power to defend the gains we had made against an inevitable reaction in the political terrain.
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In our experience, an infrastructural understanding of power also opened offensive paths for us to avoid getting locked into head-on, symmetrical conflicts with better-resourced adversaries. It does not usually make sense to attempt to meet our enemy’s repressive forces head on with greater numbers or force—whether in a defensive attempt to hold a space against a siege or an offensive attempt to besiege the guarded fortresses of our enemies (City Hall, the Capitol, downtown). While there are conditions under which such confrontations are strategic, in general, we have found that if a movement’s strategy is defined around pursuing those, this will exhaust the movement, incur defeats, and reduce it to largely reactive activity. An asymmetrical approach instead considers where our adversaries are weak, how to stretch them thin by going where they are unprepared, and finding pressure points that maximize impact—such as the infrastructure undergirding a project. This enables a movement to take the initiative, forces its adversaries to respond from a position of weakness, and creates the conditions to win victories and mobilize greater forces.
We learned some of these lessons the hard way in camp defense. While the initial defense of the ARCH was inspiring for stopping a sweep head on, it also illustrated the difficult of repeating such a victory: our adversaries could come back at any time, and being ready to stop them on short notice would have required an unsustainable level of vigilance and capacity for rapid response. Similarly, the weekly schedule of the highway sweeps meant that one day’s victory could be swept away by the work crew’s return the next week. By pivoting to an asymmetrical conflict model, targeting WorkQuest with pressure at places we weren’t expected, we opened up new fronts and took the initiative, acting on our own schedule rather than responding to the sweeps schedule.
This does not mean that movements should abandon defensive fights, but that we should shift our approach to them. Asymmetrical approaches de-emphasize holding terrain at all costs, while recognizing it as essential. Rather than an all-or-nothing fight, defending terrain becomes a question of maximizing the costs for our opponents, minimizing our own losses, increasing combativeness and offensive opportunities, and rebuilding or seizing new terrain after the siege. Even when our movement was smaller, our efforts were strongest when they balanced tactical, defensive retreats with counteroffensives against the infrastructure of the sweeps.
We continued to maintain a presence at sweeps, where we aimed to maximize delays, build connections and courage to support resistance in the camps, and help people rebuild afterwards. We knew that the sweeps operated according to a tight schedule, and that substantial delays along their route would either force them to come back another day, delay a sweep until the following week, or impact their obligations to other contracts. We reasoned that any delays we could force might give some relief to those further down the schedule who would get passed over that week, and that delays would drain more money and labor out of the contract. We also helped people to replace the tents and other survival gear that they had lost in sweeps in order to minimize the impact on people’s lives and ensure that the camps could persist.
Employing this strategy, we achieved a couple major victories when entire camps resisted the sweeps, refusing to move or harassing the sweeps crews to slow them down. Some of these moments of resistance emerged spontaneously; others only after sustained efforts building direct relationships that gave us a basis of trust and courage to act alongside camp residents. Based on internal emails from Public Works, we know that our presence was a major nuisance for them. Eventually, they cracked down on our ability to mess with the sweeps from within the camps by enforcing a “work zone” rule allowing them to arrest people for trespassing while a sweep was ongoing.
By the end of the sweeps defense movement cycle, many of these lessons had been forgotten or had not spread widely enough, or we simply lacked the capacity to act on them. We had lost the ability to put pressure on the infrastructure of the sweeps or to turn the conflict into an asymmetrical one rather than a head-on clash. By 2022, due to the enforcement of the work zone rules, sweeps watch crews were unable to do much more than bear witness to the suffering of others or help them move their belongings. At a moment when the movement was declining, some tried to mobilize larger groups to resist each sweep head on, but these groups never really materialized. Actions like the City Hall occupation, while politically important in other ways, remained focused on targeting the symbolic halls of power rather than the material infrastructure of the sweeps. There was one small appearance at the home of the Relief Enterprises CEO, but it was far less forceful than the 2020 home demo against WorkQuest.
While it likely would not have stopped the post-Prop B sweeps, it remains an open question how returning to an understanding of the infrastructural nature of power and a strategy of asymmetrical conflict might have opened new avenues for the movement when it was facing decline. What if sweeps watch didn’t just invite people to bear witness to devastation, but converted camp defense into highway blockades that stopped the circulatory system of the city? Such a strategy could have employed the car demo tactic as well. What if the occupation of City Hall had targeted the offices and homes of sweeps contractors, or other politically and economically important parts of the city beyond the trap of downtown?
There are no guarantees, only possibilities and questions to bear in mind in future fights. But it is essential to recognize that for now, our enemies are much bigger and better equipped than us, and we are strongest when we target their weak points rather than being drawn into direct clashes.
Movement Polarities
One of our hypotheses, tested and refined through our experience in Stop the Sweeps, is that what we call social movements can be better understood as an open field of forces, each engaged with others to various degrees in relationships of collaboration and contestation, affinity and hostility, coalition and competition. What we describe as a “movement” is an emergent culmination of the interplay of these forces, irreducible to any sum of its component parts. Distinct actors within this field might be understood as poles—rallying points around which cohere a set of ideas, strategies, and ways of acting. These poles exert forces within the field of the movement, attracting new people and connections, pushing back on others, and spreading or clashing with other ideas within the terrain. Some poles may be able to affect those around them through their actions, transmitting ideas or causing shifts in the field of possibilities; other poles may find themselves isolated or ineffective, unable to act on their own terms or influence others.
This view of movements as a field of forces and polarities clarifies a few things. First, it directs our focus not just to what an individual or a group is but to what it can do—how it affects the field of the movement and others in it. This emphasis on doing can help us let go of anxieties around recruiting people to join our organizations, focusing us instead on ways to spread autonomous and militant ways of acting. Influential poles can generate powerful proposals, models, or invitations to act that spread across crews, organizations, and networks. Furthermore, we can better understand the lines of transmission between groups, factions, and ideologies in movements through this framework. Rather than perceiving distinct sects (as implied by the term sectarian), we can discern how the force exerted by a pole can overflow the boundaries of a particular organization, or how people and groups themselves can move between different poles of a movement through their activity.
Using this framework, we can perceive and act upon the possibilities latent in open-ended situations. We can see how these situations emerge as organic reactions to flashpoints of oppressive force; we can grasp how a protest movement can reach a scale and intensity that escape the control of those who “organized” it to become more potent and infectious. Perceptive and strategic militants can find the openings in such moments to contribute in ways that help to shape the outcome—forging new relationships, advancing new strategies or tactics, and enabling greater coordination, self-organization, or escalation. In Stop the Sweeps, this was one of our greatest strengths, whether we were engaging with a sweep, the waves of activity in the course of the George Floyd Uprising, the Abbott encampments and city COVID hotels, or rallies and occupations initiated by other groups.
Stop the Sweeps emerged to fill a gap in the existing movement. While the Homes Not Handcuffs (HnH) coalition had secured the legislative victory of repealing the camping ban, they had failed to build the political force necessary to defend their win. So, when the city government responded to a wave of reaction a few months later by sweeping the ARCH at the same time that the state government cracked down with sweeps under the highway, the non-profit coalition was caught flat-footed. They scheduled a meeting at Street Forum the weekend before the sweeps to plan a response that would focus on legal observing, documentation, media campaigns, and continued legislative advocacy. The non-profit coalition kept most of its focus on Abbott’s exterminationist rhetoric, drawing no attention to the city’s or NGO’s use of sweeps to control the unhoused.
The cell that became Stop the Sweeps began as a group of friends who started showing up in the mornings at the camp outside the ARCH in anticipation of the sweep. The timing of these sweeps was left vague and constantly delayed; but keeping this rhythm for two weeks led to a series of connections with people at that camp and some strategic conversations among the handful of us. When the announcement finally came that the ARCH sweep would occur on the same day as Abbott’s sweep of the camps under the highway, we had already laid the groundwork for launching Stop the Sweeps.
When we attended the Homes Not Handcuffs response meeting and noticed that their plan did not include any attention on the sweeps at the ARCH, nor plans for direct resistance to the sweeps, we decided to break out into our own group adjacent to their meeting. At that meeting, we developed our own plan to mobilize a combative presence at the ARCH. While we could not stretch ourselves to mobilize on multiple fronts, we retained some presence at the highway sweeps to support any organic resistance to them. We took the name Stop the Sweeps—both a demand and a form of action—and put out our own call to action on our nascent socials.
Rather than attempting to convince the HnH coalition to adopt a more confrontational strategy (or calling them out for their failure to do so), we identified an opening in the movement where we could act and filled it. We sidestepped direct conflict with the non-profit wing of the movement in favor of opening up space for autonomous action alongside the non-profit’s strategy. Seizing the opportunity to mobilize where the rest of the movement did not have a presence was advantageous in this regard, and helped avoid conflicts over “hijacking” or about escalating beyond the risk tolerance of HnH. Similarly, while those of us at the highway camps communicated with HnH forces on the ground, we made separate decisions to support unhoused people planning to resist the sweeps while the others focused on their strategy.
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Making our own plan enabled us to connect with other scattered forces, both within and outside the movement, that had been looking for more combative forms of engagement. In the days leading up to the ARCH sweep, we connected with members of the DSA-LSC who were involved in HnH and hungry to employ direct action tactics against the sweeps. They were able to leverage some of the contact lists that the coalition had not utilized, using email blasts and phone banking to turn people out to the ARCH. Through our existing connections, we were also able to pull in friends from anti-fascist and anti-police organizing.
Consequently, a small group without its own base was able to bring together about thirty people on a Monday. We temporarily prevented the destruction of the camp at the ARCH—at least, until they came back at 4 am.
From its inception, Stop the Sweeps existed in this delicate balance between maintaining connections to other actors in the movement and acting on our own terms. We attended the meetings that Homes Not Handcuffs hosted and maintained lines of communication with people in those groups; at the same time, we planned our own ways to engage on the ground, created our own narrative, and called our own actions. Calling our own action at the sweep that Homes Not Handcuffs had decided not to respond to was one example of this; mobilizing to support unhoused people who planned to resist the sweeps under the highways was another.
Homes Not Handcuffs held one more meeting after the sweeps started. We attended and made up most of the “sweeps defense” breakout group; the other two groups were focused on policy advocacy around criminalization and housing. We ultimately absorbed the sweeps defense group into our efforts; we later learned that the other groups never got off the ground after that meeting. The consolidation of this pole and its rapid growth gave us the momentum to transition into confronting the Texas Department of Transportation’s weekly sweep schedule after November 4. As the only group still actively following, resisting, and shaping the narrative around the sweeps, we were able to shift the movement towards a more radical position.
Mercenaries destroying the homes of the houseless.
A few months into our work together, we had started to develop relationships with a wider range of groups. Seeking to increase the coordination and strategic intelligence of the movement, we initiated a closed assembly called The Hive. We framed it as an assembly that we were curating to be focused on shared action and reflection, explicitly not a decision-making space. The space was organized around three central principles: priority to grassroots, autonomous groups over non-profit and political organizations; a commitment to not undermining the work of other groups; and a commitment to not collaborating with the police against other wings of the movement. This last principle was intentionally crafted to make space for groups organized at state-run camps, which navigated complex relationships with the police and security that governed them, while holding a line to insulate the rest of the movement.
The Hive brought together a wide range of factions including non-profits, self-organized homeless collectives, the street newspaper, DSA, mutual aid groups, tenant organizers, and harm reduction groups. It served as a venue for communication and cross-pollination across different groups and fronts of the struggle. At various points, the assembly grappled with questions related to squatting and takeover schemes, pushing back against policing in the COVID hotels, and forming locally-rooted support and defense groups for camps. Many of the relationships that formed through this assembly came to form the initial core of the Camp Support network.
Building on the relationships formed in the Hive, we were positioned to bring groups together to build out the Camp Support mutual aid network after existing social services shut down following the outbreak of COVID-19. One comrade connected us with a church kitchen; the local Food Not Bombs chapter provided know-how and a network of cooks to start sending out meals. As we met more groups after the George Floyd Uprising, we were able to help them connect to this work in addition to sweeps watch, bringing together a dozen or so small organizations offering everything from harm reduction to resources for sex workers. At first, the success of this network underlined the painfully slow response of the city government to the public health crisis.
This was complicated when city resources finally caught up months into the pandemic and approached the network about using our volunteers to shuttle its prepared meals. The network accepted this deal, opting to use them as we pleased and to build what we hoped would be fighting relationships with camp residents. This part of the mutual aid work remained underdeveloped; the volunteers who brought food only showed up to fight alongside people at sweeps on rare occasions. Camp support coordinators did use their access to city food program meetings to pester city bureaucrats into putting pressure on the agencies running sweeps, and this was one prong of a successful effort to defeat most of the sweeps during the initial months of the pandemic.
Our ability to act decisively and maintain a wide range of complex relationships with other formations depended in large part on the high degree of trust and shared context within the core group of Stop the Sweeps, which emerged from our long-term relationships and experience throwing down together. The strong connections among our core group enabled us to take bold action and gave us the emotional resilience to engage in more complicated coalitional relationships with tact and grace. We had space to voice and think through critiques of other formations and strategies and to reflect on our relationships to other groups despite our differences. This helped release pressure and avoid unnecessary direct conflict.
As time went on and some of our initial crew stepped back, we started to bring in new people we met through our activity. We developed a set of principles and a process for onboarding people, emphasizing experience working together and a sensibility that resonated with our principles and strategy. We avoided rushing to recruit people, and emphasized the many ways to get involved in specific forms of activity that did not require formally joining Stop the Sweeps—such as planning specific actions, coming to the Hive, and coordinating around sweeps defense. This process helped to expand our crew and bring in new energy at crucial moments, especially when the movement was beginning to scale up and we encountered a number of other fellow travelers.
This also meant that the group composition slowly shifted so that there were fewer long-term, high-context relationships in the group. Eventually, many of us only knew each other from the movement against sweeps. As the latter phases of the movement brought more intense conflicts and we encountered new limits, members of our crew responded differently to these situations. Some members pushed to engage more directly in the intra-movement conflicts, such as by making demands of Austin Mutual Aid (AMA).
When Little Petal Alliance (LPA) launched an occupation at City Hall in response to Prop B, our group was divided in new ways. Some members saw the occupation as an open-ended situation full of potential and self-organization that exceeded any one group, and wanted to engage with it; others were wary due to a combination of tactical critiques and legitimate criticisms of the harmful and opportunistic behaviors of members of LPA. When the camping ban ushered in the demolition of camps, some members pushed for more urgent activity and took out their frustrations on other participants in the movement. Most devastatingly, this led to a split with one of the unhoused activists who was a founding member. Our experience demonstrates the need to remain attuned to how the changing composition of a group over time, alongside shifting movement conditions, can change the forms of trust and collaboration that are possible, even if it nominally remains organized around the same principles and strategy.
Understanding our activity in terms of the constitution of poles allows us to evaluate our relationships with other formations on the basis of what they make possible or foreclose. Relationships with other groups—even those with whom we have significant differences when it comes to our orientation towards demands, reform, the state, or other institutions—can open up opportunities to leverage information, increase our ability to circulate proposals and influence other factions of the movement, and produce openings for creative forms of activity. If we understand the porous, shifting, open-ended nature of all groups, we can see how they might transform in the course of a movement. Cultivating relationships with groups that work with the state while maintaining our own irreducible antagonism towards it can create new tensions, reshaping the demands of other wings of the movement and making it more difficult for the authorities to divide a movement into those they can co-opt and those they can repress.
The central consideration in such relationships is to keep the initiative and always maintain autonomy. Relationships can also have the effect of stifling possibilities rather than generating them; we can stifle our own initiatives for fear of upsetting other factions, end up tailing other formations, or become absorbed in the efforts of other groups. Maintaining the initiative within the field of movement polarity moves us away from the habit of merely critiquing other groups’ activities that we disagree with, so that we focus instead on how to develop and spread our own ideas and models for action as we collaborate and compete with others for influence.
These relationships require minimum standards of respect. Active hostility or denouncements, undermining others’ efforts, collaborating with the state against other wings of the movement, or acting as an extension of state, politician, or capitalist influence over the movement often precludes such relationships. Such dynamics have often defined the relationship between autonomous groups and other factions of movements, whether reformist, non-profit, or authoritarian left. However, it is not inevitable that these relationships must always be antagonistic. An understanding of movement polarity can identify the avenues for collaboration beyond simplistic ideological categories, so that autonomous groups can avoid becoming trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict with everyone else.
Our relationships with Homes Not Handcuffs enabled us to receive and leverage certain forms of information regarding the motivations of city council members and the dynamics between them, upcoming meeting items and policy changes, and pressure points and information about the effects of our actions on the departments enacting the sweeps. We were also able to produce scandals as a means of shaping the demands that HnH brought to City Council, which enabled us to exert influence on the negotiations without participating in them. At the same time, we were able to continue agitating against the city departments and social service providers that the coalition negotiated with.
This framework also helped us to locate our work in this particular campaign in relation to the broader radical milieu in Austin. In 2019, the organizing terrain was complicated for autonomous organizers. Most organizing was dominated by non-profit organizations, the vast majority of which were hostile to more radical activity. There was a range of progressive non-profit and community advocacy organizations that had more radical political ideas, but whose activity was mostly oriented around policy advocacy and rallies at City Hall. Within the radical milieu, the Maoist milieu surrounding Red Guards Austin (RGA) had absorbed many of the people looking for more militant activity who were dissatisfied with the community organizer scene. As a consequence of sectarian conflict with other movement organizations, abusive authoritarian dynamics, and reckless disregard for their members’ well-being, Red Guards Austin had poisoned the well for militant activity. It was hard to engage in militant organizing, criticize non-profits, or even to wear a mask without being accused of being part of Red Guards.
Part of our goal was to use our activity in Stop the Sweeps to open the field for more activity beyond the influence of the non-profit organizations and the Maoists. We developed a way of acting that emphasized autonomous principles without explicitly flagging ourselves as anarchists. We experimented with ways to push the tactical repertoire of the movement without entering into direct conflict with other factions or alienating potential collaborators. Many of us were intimately familiar with the caustic effect that the Maoists specifically had on movements that they entered and knew that we could not maintain our autonomy or initiative while working with them. We also knew that they thrived on direct conflict and polemics against other groups. So when they made attempts to gain inroads into the movement, we simply ignored them and did our own thing.
There is a long history of conflict between the autonomous factions of various movements and those oriented towards reformist negotiations or party organization building. In some cases, the strategies of autonomous militants contribute to this dynamic, particularly when they create a situation in which the contradictions between groups are resolved through a simple sorting of ideological or tactical alignments. Call-outs and polemics, direct conflict with reformist or “less militant” factions of a movement, and filtering all political allegiances through a rigid ideological filter can mirror liberal denunciations, collaboration with the state, and peace policing.
Ideally, the framework of movement polarity offers an experimental path beyond this impasse, though it can challenge assumptions about the role of ideology. How correct our critiques are will make no difference if they only result in us constructing isolated cliques instead of developing the ability to intervene in complex situations. Our hypothesis is that positioning ourselves within these contradictions rather than forcing them towards a simple resolution can open up generative possibilities. We hope others will test and refine this.
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Using and Being Used: On Media and Communications Tools
We were media savvy yet media critical. This is rare in a milieu divided between anarchists who oppose any engagement with media on principle and anarchists whose primary form of communication is the Instagram-Infographic-Industrial-Complex.
We used social media as a tool to develop our own narrative and analysis of the sweeps. Every week, we would get practice writing reports on the previous week’s sweeps—drawing attention to their cruelty and to the growth of the resistance. This regular rhythm helped us document the sweeps at a point when most of the media coverage had dried up along with the attention of the larger organizations. As our posts spread—sometimes, ironically, due to reactionary hate comments boosting our performance in the algorithm—we were able to invite more people to join us in sweeps watch. For those who wouldn’t or couldn’t join, combining these posts with calls for phone and email blasts offered ways to enable spectators to participate.
At the same time, we strategically engaged traditional news outlets. We had access to some media contacts thanks to Homes Not Handcuffs, and we mobilized a number of these outlets to cover the ARCH sweep and create political pressure around it. In the process, we developed a number of relatively friendly media connections who helped to circulate our narrative and occasionally follow up on reports and questions that helped to inform our campaigns.
At a certain point, we were able to use an offensive media strategy to produce scandal. Whenever we caught the sweeps crew on camera in an egregious act—throwing out water during the height of summer, destroying camping supplies in violation of their stated “clean-up” policies, or harassing and threatening sweeps watch volunteers—we could circulate the media and draw negative attention. Sometimes, this alone was enough to exert pressure on the higher-ups, and we saw the crews act differently on subsequent sweeps.
Sometimes, we took this further. We would generate a scandal, then tap one of our friendly media contacts to reach out to the relevant city department or company for comment. The department, trying to maintain public legitimacy, would make some minor concession to something we were demanding. The journalist would tweet out this response and, without waiting for a formal article, we would seize on this as new “policy.” Then we would launch a new set of demands, always pushing the envelope. We did not treat these demands as points of negotiation, but as discursive trenches—as soon as our enemies made a concession, we would dig new a new trench to keep pushing them further, ensuring they remained on the back foot. Combined with phone zaps and on-the-ground resistance, this approach de-fanged the sweeps for most of 2020.
Whether we were publishing our own reports or engaging with journalists, our strength came from developing our own strategy for engaging each of these media forms rather than letting them impose their logic on us. We used social media to circulate report-backs, but we avoided using it for discourse or petty conflict; we did not subordinate our political activities to the pursuit of followers or engagement. Similarly, we used corporate media to circulate our analysis and to produce scandals for our opponents while refusing to get mired in concerns about optics or respectability. Releasing a press release for a home demo was a way of seeking publicity on our own terms. We intentionally avoided news stations that we knew were hostile; we did not fetishize talking to media as an end in itself.
All media and communication tools contain their own internal logic. If we don’t intentionally impose our own logic on them, they will impose their logic on us. Our movements already recognize how corporate media represent specific class interests. We are starting to become aware of how social media do the same—from outright censorship to the ways that algorithms privilege certain forms of interaction while suppressing others, thereby shaping how we think, act, and relate.
This became especially clear to us as we reflected on one of our most-used tools, the Signal chat.
What happens when all organizing moves to Signal?
Early on in our campaign, we used Signal chats in limited ways. We communicated via one core chat for the Stop the Sweeps crew. Some of us maintained a small text blast system that we would plug new contacts into; we used this system to announce upcoming sweeps and bring people out to sweeps watch. We would follow up with them in direct messages, then orient them on the ground. This worked well enough until one week, the person bottom-lining follow-up fell ill. To streamline communication, they made a Signal chat including all the people who would be coming out for sweeps watch that day so we could coordinate with each other. Over the next few weeks, this pattern of starting coordination-focused group chats for sweeps days continued until we created a general sweeps watch chat, where a growing layer of participants from outside the core group could share information and self-organize breakout chats for specific sweeps.
The sweeps watch Signal chat became the movement’s defining platform. As we encountered new allies and plugged them into sweeps defense, they would be added to this chat. The chat took on a life of its own, with people announcing upcoming sweeps and self-organizing separate chats for each week’s sweeps. At first, most people in the chat probably knew most other people in it, or else came to know them by participating in sweeps watch. The conversations were mostly limited to sweeps-related planning. The big Signal chat enabled us to scale up our organizing by taking the labor of follow-up and orientation off our hands: someone new could connect with other people on the ground and get the lay of the land from whatever experienced people were there. Creating another large channel to coordinate camp support—complete with its own array of breakout chats related to specific projects, infrastructure, and camps—increased the movement’s capacity to scale.
If you’ve been running in activist circles long enough, you know where this is headed.
At some point, the Signal chats hit a crucial turning point. They had expanded in size, in part due to the ballooning camp support network that was bringing new people into sweeps watch. By that time, a large number of the participants had not met each other. The expansion of the movement ecosystem meant people in each chat were likely involved in a number of other projects, with varying degrees of affinity or tension with other groups in the ecosystem. While this communication system worked for a while, it began to break down around the same time that the movement began to hit other limits.
The big chats slowly lost their focus on coordination as people started to use them as discussion forums in which to debate strategy and tactics. At times, a small group of people would engage in lengthy discussion in the chats, with dozens of others as a captive audience. This became particularly fraught in moments of emotional intensity (for example, immediately after a sweep)—especially when the parties in conflict did not know each other or already had existing tensions. Over time, other movement conflicts were imported into the chat, as well. By the time the camping ban came down, these dynamics had already drained collective engagement in the big chats. Consequently, the movement fragmented as economic normalcy was imposed at the conclusion of the lockdown.
The Signal chat is a useful tool, but like other communication platforms, it tends to impose its own logic. As a Signal chat grows, two things happen. First, the chats can generate too much noise to be helpful. High-traffic conversations among dozens of participants quickly add up to hundreds of messages, especially if there are not shared norms regarding what sort of information belongs in the channel. Second, the levels of trust and vulnerability decrease as fewer of the participants are connected by real relationships. This compounds with the way that tone, body language, and other aspects of communication are lost via text—so that when conflict takes place, it occurs without a basis for trust, leading to escalating tension and hurt feelings.
In our experience, Signal chats were most useful when organized around a defined purpose, usually limited to coordinating and sharing information. Ideally big, chats should keep chatter to a minimum, making space for deeper coordination or planning conversations in smaller breakout chats, such as the date-specific sweeps watch chats. Strategic debates and conflicts should be worked out in small groups or private chats between comrades engaging in good faith. Higher-stakes emotional conversations or strategic debates should ideally take place in person or at least on a call, to maximize the extent to which the participants can be emotionally present and engage in a full spectrum of communication. It may be helpful to set a precedent for moderating and maintaining norms in a chat early on to ensure that chats do not devolve into meetings or amorphous discussion forums. Because we had not set that precedent at the outset, it was difficult for us to intervene as moderators.
These are ways to adjust how we use the tool; but we should also reduce our dependence on the tool. If a Signal chat is frequently being overwhelmed with other kinds of conversation, that indicates a need for additional containers. In our experience, while there were lots of meetings to deal with the week-to-week activities, our movement had few containers for broader reflection or debate, few release valves for tensions and conflict. Building these missing components into our movements is essential—otherwise, what you repress will eventually burst into the chat in explosive ways.
Some of these things are more feasible with Signal now. Signal has since added Admin roles and permissions, which enable better moderation and the creation of announcement-only channels. Movements may benefit from centering dedicated announcement-only channels in order to ensure that a broad range of participants receive the most essential updates. Letting smaller chats handle planning, coordination, and strategy can create more intentional and sustainable avenues for those conversations.
On the other hand, it can inhibit a movement to over-correct and impose limits too early. If your organizing channels consist of small chats without much activity, it’s not helpful to impose rules to limit activity—and rather than reducing message quantity, too many breakout channels containing the same five people will only gratuitously inflate the number chats. While it eventually limited us, for a time, the open Signal chat enabled us to grow. The best thing is to anticipate the limits and develop plans for addressing them as you reach them.
Movement Money Problems
The last year or two of the camp support movement was defined by conflicts around money. This mirrored similar conflicts elsewhere around the country between 2020 and 2022. Questions about who raised money and what they used it for became divisive, provoking inflammatory conflicts that dissolved organizations, even entire movements. We want to reflect on our experiences for the next time these questions resurface and offer some thoughts for movements elsewhere to consider as well.
In the early weeks of Stop the Sweeps, we carried out limited goal-oriented fundraising, chiefly to replace tents, sleeping bags, and other essential survival gear lost in the sweeps. This was strategic as well as ethical: replenishing these supplies helped maintain the camps and thwart the goal of the sweeps. Our largest fundraising effort was a $3000 GoFundMe to buy 100 tents. The member with keys to the GoFundMe tracked itemized withdrawals and purchases. Since the goals were clear and the stakes relatively low, we were able to make most decisions easily over Signal chats, filling time-sensitive needs for shelter after each sweep. Most discussions focused on which stores to purchase from. Occasionally, we also fundraised for bail and legal funds for friends who were arrested resisting the sweeps. Had we expanded the scope of our fundraising, made larger purchases, or made fundraising a core facet of our organizing strategy, we might have needed a different container for financial decisions.
Money played a bigger and more controversial role in the camp support movement, which from its early days networked together a number of different initiatives around shared infrastructure, such as collective kitchens that relied on various organizations for their distribution network. One group, named Austin Mutual Aid (AMA), began to form a fundraising apparatus for this network. Its founder, Bobby Cooper, was a contentious figure; a white man from New York who had organized in Occupy Sandy, his ego and abrasive personality caused some tensions in this network. For the most part, the network was big enough and Austin Mutual Aid small enough that people could hold them at a distance, only approaching them for funds around things like water in the summer or cold-weather gear in the winter.
Things changed with Winter Storm Uri in 2021. AMA had had the forethought to claim a name primed for search engine optimization. As millions around the country turned their attention to supporting groups in Texas, AMA’s winter fundraiser gained mainstream attention—going so far as to be shared by cast members of Queer Eye. It ballooned to some $3 million, and AMA gained the national media spotlight as the face of mutual aid in Austin. Suddenly, a group that had been marginal and annoying was central to the movement. This inflamed the existing tensions and resentments, adding stakes on the scale of millions of dollars.
The following months saw protracted conflicts over the allocation of this money, the handling of the Winter Storm response in general, and AMA’s role in relation to the rest of the movement. The conflict crossed Signal threads, Instagram slide decks, and many-hours-long Zoom and Jitsi calls. Probably every organization in the movement had at least one meeting about AMA, and many participated in AMA’s “community meeting” to decide how to distribute the money. Among other things, people accused AMA of taking credit for work that was largely carried out by other groups, raising money and gatekeeping access to it, white saviorism, charity-style work, using other groups’ media for their own fundraising, and not using the funds to offer people long-term housing, whether in the hotels that were taken over during the freeze or in regular apartments.
Stop the Sweeps participated in some of these conflicts, including private criticisms of AMA, social media call-outs, and hour-long Zoom calls. How might we have approached those conflicts differently? How could future movements avoid or mitigate them?
There was certainly truth to the criticisms of AMA. There was a crucial moment when AMA’s fundraising far exceeded what they had hoped to raise or had plans for. That could have been a good time to pause their fundraiser and direct potential donors to some of the other projects that were raising funds, like the Jordan’s Place police-free autonomous zone established by the Black revolutionary organization 400+1 in East Austin during the 2021 winter storm. Instead, AMA leaned into the spotlight, taking media appearances, speaking on behalf of the movement, and claiming others’ work.
AMA’s blunders should serve as a warning to any group that might accidentally stumble into large sums of money—as a number of pre-existing bail funds and mutual aid projects did in 2020—to take a cautious and disciplined approach to finances. Organize fundraisers with clear plans for how much you hope to raise and how you will use it. While it can be great to exceed goals, at a certain scale, raising more money than anticipated can create confusion, liability, and conflict. It may be better to shut down a fundraiser once it has exceeded its goal and direct people to other groups. This can insulate your crew from money conflicts, redistribute resources in crucial ways, and help build goodwill with the broader movement.
Regardless of who raises them, large sums of money can generate conflict and create liability. While AMA was a particularly controversial organization, we doubt that any organization that ended up in that position would have avoided criticism and conflict. Controlling large amounts of money and attention inevitably stokes resentment, jealousy, and political factionalism. Even if a group has a solid plan for raising and using large amounts of money, and even if that group maintains good relations and collaboration with other factions of the movement, the existence of that fundraising capacity can give rise to all sorts of friction. The project you are funding will be criticized: it’s not militant, not mutual aid, not strategic, not sustainable, not democratic enough, it doesn’t center the right groups, it’s not safe enough, not organized enough. Not all of this critique will be in good faith; some of it will simply be a cover for interpersonal or factional competition.
We should be generous and graceful in our criticisms of groups that stumble into money. While we should generate and share good-faith political critiques of the decisions that they make, moralizing and attacks often do not help anyone. Groups are not necessarily enemies or threats to a movement because they don’t use money in the ways that we think they should or distribute it through the process we consider most just. Many such groups are simply figuring out a complicated situation as they go, the same way we would in their shoes.
If we aim to work in movements that involve a wide range of political and strategic orientations, we will have to accept diverging perspectives on big questions. Unnecessarily escalating political conflicts into movement-wide fractures consumes a disproportionate amount of everyone’s energy, sapping it from more fruitful activities. When we identify the political differences that distinguish us from another group, those offer ripe ground for launching new projects, leading by example, and acting on our own terms, rather than simply criticizing.
Recognizing and Transcending Limits
To understand the rapid growth of the movement against sweeps and its ultimate collapse, it is helpful to think of movements as always running up against and struggling to transcend particular limits. Focusing on the limits of movements moves us from a framework that externalizes our problems (blaming them on liberals, non-profits, the state, the police, sectarians, authoritarians, rival factions) to a framework that approaches our problems chiefly as internal, organizational questions. If our movements will inevitably confront co-optation, repression, or fragmentation, we should look inward to understand what aspects of our strategy make us vulnerable to these and experiment with ways to become capable of overcoming them.
The effectiveness of any tactic is determined by context. This includes considerations such as whether it brings new people into the movement, whether the movement can sustain the tactic, and how prepared our enemies are to mitigate its effectiveness. The same tactic repeated in a different context, or even at a different point in the same movement, can produce completely different results. Innovation and experimentation can help overcome limits related to tactics, while fetishizing or stigmatizing tactics can keep a movement stuck in ineffective repetition.
Transcending the limits of sweeps watch by reorienting towards camp support helped us expand the movement at a crucial moment. For the first few months, the rhythm of sweeps watch helped us connect to people in the camps, plug people into a concrete activity, gather information about the contractors, gain experience in confrontational action, and make a political scandal out of the sweeps. Over time, we began to hit new limits, as we could not add numbers fast enough to keep up with the sweeps and faced arrests as a consequence of new work zone rules. Before COVID-19 hit, we had already begun to imagine alternative ways to approach sweeps watch, such as creating locally-based networks in the neighborhoods near particular camps.
The switch to camp support activated a new, broader network of people and activities. People built consistent relationships with the specific camps they supported, which enabled them to report back on camp needs and any sweeps announcements. This brought more people into sweeps defense generally, so that our smaller group’s capacity wasn’t always stretched to its limit. Camp support also overcame a barrier to using the old sweeps defense model during the pandemic: when traveling between the camps posed the risk of inter-camp viral transmission, the distributed defense model helped mitigate that threat. As camp support grew, so did our capacity to mobilize people against the sweeps through sweeps defense, phone zaps, and car demos. This network also leaped into action with the George Floyd Rebellion. One of the main battlegrounds of the rebellion in Austin was in front of APD headquarters, where protestors shared the space with a camp under the highway overpass at I-35 and 7th Street. After the height of the uprising, many individuals and new groups joined the network, turning to mutual aid work as a continuation of the uprising, sometimes at the same location.
Tactics that generate potential at one time can themselves become limits. This becomes clear when we reflect on the missed opportunities of “mutual aid.” Camp support arose at a critical moment when existing social services had shut down due to the pandemic, leaving many on the street without consistent access to food and other necessities. Filling this gap, mutual aid was a way of securing the survival of the camps; this hearkens back to some of the forms of mutual aid as communal care and support that precede colonialism and capitalism, and which oppressed and exploited peoples have used to survive within them. During the first phase of the pandemic, the Camp Support network basically supplanted the city’s disaster response efforts. This recurred when the network mobilized to supply and shelter dozens of people during Winter Storm Uri, filling in where the city government did nothing. In both cases, the network’s efforts compelled the city to offer access to some food program meetings and to ask to use the network to deliver its prepared meals. The network made use of these resources, nominally towards its own ends.
Supplies stored in an Austin Mutual Aid donation center after Winter Storm Uri.
These efforts were closely tied to confrontational movement activity, as they were connected to sweeps defense, the rent strike movement of the early pandemic, and the George Floyd Rebellion; consequently, they were also part of a broader strategic framework. By the end of 2021, however, something had changed. The initial political context of camp support had been forgotten. Moralistic rhetoric framed mutual aid as a radical act unto itself, putting it above criticism and turning it into an obligation. This erased the need for mutual aid to be connected to other confrontational political activity; the only purpose was to provide the most meals to the greatest number of people. At the same time, the conditions were changing: social services had resumed, making camp support food distribution less essential, and even wasteful in some cases. Yet to make an argument for focusing on something other than “mutual aid” was considered unthinkable.
We suspect that our experiences with the fetishization of “mutual aid” were a fractal reflection of a national trend. For us, mutual aid is important as a political project, not a moral task. Camp support and food distribution are good, but whether they are worth the majority of our organizing efforts depends on the conditions we are acting in and what the results will be. We understood camp support as a way to deepen our relationships with the camps, seeing the meal as a chance to build a foundation for trust so as to collaborate in more militant sweep defense or combative activity around other issues. This framework is distinct from a social services model that treats service provision as the end goal. It demands that we evaluate how much energy mutual aid efforts take and whether they are worth pursuing at the expense of other tasks.
This form of mutual aid also ran up against limits we can see in previous cycles of autonomous disaster response and mutual aid. In the initial window of a disaster, autonomous groups can effectively set up and sustain infrastructure to support large groups of people. While highly effective during this window of time, they are rarely able to translate this into a deeper crisis for the state or the economy, nor to undermine the inevitable reimposition of normalcy, organize new and enduring social relationships, or transform these efforts into sustainable and combative projects after the disaster recedes.
Notably, what people were calling mutual aid was decidedly not mutual; it was a largely one-directional, service-oriented model of activism. Early on, this emerged of necessity due to COVID-19 precautions, which limited our ability to build more collective relationships and gather with people. However, over time, this meant that the relationship between a camp support volunteer and a food insecure person in a camp was primarily defined by the giving and receiving of a meal. Sometimes, this relationship included other “case worker” services, such as help with medical services and public benefits—but that, also, failed to break the dynamic of service provider and recipient. Delivering food did not in itself generate deeper political relationships, enable shared struggle, or build the reciprocity that could grow into new kinds of social relationships and life-giving infrastructure.
Additionally, this meant that very little of the infrastructure built for camp support could actually sustain the ones doing the work—instead, it wore out the small handful of people who coordinated most of the effort. The early growth of camp support was possible in large part due to the pandemic shutdown, with paused or remote work and increased benefits enabling large numbers of people to dedicate time to the efforts. By spring 2021, however, the slow reimposition of normalcy meant that benefits were drying up, life was getting more expensive, and more people had to go back to work, draining the network’s capacity. With most of the infrastructure geared towards outward-facing service provision, the mutual aid networks could not provide people the support they needed to stay engaged in the movement. In the slow decay of the mutual aid networks, we were neither living nor fighting.
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This model of activism is ripe for cooptation because it is essentially similar to state or NGO social services—just horizontally organized and less well-funded. Without no political strategy beyond feeding as many people as possible, in the face of waning capacity due to changing economic conditions, it was difficult to justify refusing to collaborate with the city government or social service providers. While the radical wings of the movement decried these changes with radical rhetoric, there was no alternative strategic framework to illuminate the limits of the camp support model. Radical ideas do not sustain people in a movement, resources and infrastructure do—and the radical wing of the movement was largely competing with the state and the nonprofit-industrial complex on their home turf. The limitations of the camp support model set the stage for the cooptation of certain wings of the movement, with groups like AMA working with social service providers like ECHO and Little Petal Alliance forming the mobile outreach wing of Sunrise Church.
If power is fundamentally determined by infrastructure, movements also confront infrastructural limits. What are the supply lines that move resources, the entry points that bring in new people, the sites of care that help reproduce the movement, the hubs where we can organize combative actions or spaces for reflection? What are their vulnerabilities, and how can our adversaries attack them? These may be direct attacks—raids, evictions, restrictions, regulation—or other issues, such as an economic shift that forces people to step back from a movement in order to resume earning money.
If we accept that movements inevitably go through phases of growth and shrinkage, we can orient our strategies towards anticipating and responding to these moments. Movement growth can necessitate new organizing formats or infrastructure to accommodate new participants, lest they overload the existing channels; movement shrinkage also requires abandoning rigid practices to make room for new possibilities. In the growth phase of a movement, the key thing is to be flexible and decisive in order to seize opportunities to level up. During movement decline, it is important to make space for reflection and strategic reorientation, to be prepared to drop practices that are no longer effective or sustainable. A movement increasing its capacity during a growth phase feels very different from a movement contracting in its decline phase, even when the movement’s actual capacity is in fact greater in the latter case.
What could have helped us to surpass the limits we reached? In view of the camp support network’s ability to out-organize the city government in the early phase of crisis, how could we have used this position of power to undercut its legitimacy, make deeper connections with those we were supporting, reinvent social relationships via new experiments in organization, or build enduring infrastructure to enable collective survival? We can try out Phil Neel’s use of the concept of “competitive control,” a term used by military strategists to describe insurgencies that produce a base of support and an alternative geography of resistance by providing services and stability where the state has failed, often alongside efforts to destabilize the state. While this framework is derived from military thought and applied to a range of repressive forces like the Taliban, it can help us to consider how autonomous forces might build power in conditions of crisis and collapse.
We can consider the efforts of 400+1 to establish an autonomous zone named Orisha Land during Winter Storm Uri as a source of inspiration. 400+1 was a federation and cadre organization oriented towards Black revolutionary autonomy that acted parallel to the camp support network, with some overlap, collaboration, and connection between the movements. During Winter Storm Uri, they declared an autonomous police-free zone called Orisha Land in the historically Black (but gentrifying) Rosewood neighborhood. They occupied a park to establish a resource hub and shelter for unhoused Black people. Renaming the park Jordan’s Place, after a Black man named Jordan Walton who was killed by APD, they maintained the occupation for a few weeks after the storm and broadcast proposals for transforming the park with gardens, community programming, and ambitious visions for shelter and housing.
The city government ultimately cleared 400+1 out of the park in a repressive maneuver parallel to its recuperation of “mutual aid” groups. While the city government incorporated some aspects of the mutual aid network, using the groups as volunteer pools for future crisis responses such as running warming and cooling centers and distributing supplies, it repressed the militant faction that was contesting its legitimacy. This counterinsurgency strategy undoubtedly inflamed some of the later movement conflicts, as those who witnessed the eviction of Jordan’s Place while AMA aligned with the city government and service provider alliance directed their ire against the latter.
400+1 were not without their own limitations, some of which they shared with the broader movement. While they were capable of powerful gestures, these were often primarily spectacular, such as a live-streamed armed procession around the neighborhood to declare the autonomous zone. Some former members report that they did not manage to follow through on all of the promises that they made to people during the Winter Storm occupation. In 2022, the group saw an exodus of members in response to internal hierarches and conflicts over responses to harm within the organization.1 Still, without romanticizing this organization, we can evaluate the strategic direction they pursued: exploiting the crisis of the winter storm and the failure of the police to maintain order to contest the state’s control of territory and promote combative visions of neighborhood-based autonomy.
What similar experiments could the camp support and sweeps defense networks have undertaken? Attempts to occupy vacant housing, hotels, or restaurants in order to establish autonomous shelters, kitchens, or resource hubs would have served to contest the state and private property. Such gestures, even if unsuccessful, can erode state control and legitimacy during crises, while opening directions that counterbalance the threat of cooptation. Some of us discussed this and followed some of these threads over the course of the movement.
The police and cooptation are two sides of the same coin.
There were moments when this approach seemed possible, such as when the network was able to run a shelter out of a hotel during the winter storm with the acquiescence of the manager. There were loose discussions about turning this into an ongoing occupation after the storm, but the necessary combination of attention, resources, and opportunity never coalesced. Perhaps if some of these gestures had proliferated, they could have worked in tandem with the efforts in Orisha Land to heighten the crisis, creating an ecosystem of escalation that could have frustrated efforts to repress some initiatives while recuperating the others. Since winter storms have become a nearly annual occurrence in Austin, mutual aid groups could build the relationships and capacities over the year to launch such initiatives when the next one hits.
Beyond these offensive paths, the network also could have tried to create lasting autonomous infrastructure. Building infrastructure for outdoor mobile kitchens or collectively-managed kitchens that could operate long term without dependence on churches could have enabled the movement to grow and transform. Perhaps, as vaccination access made it possible to begin gathering with others again, the network’s activity could have shifted from constant meal delivery services to hosting community dinners at which food was not simply given but shared, fostering new kinds of social relationships while sustaining the people making the food and running the space. Such communal gathering spaces could host trainings, assemblies, and strategic conversations—so that sharing food would give rise to collective deliberation, forming the basis for future projects. Ambitious proposals like these could have flourished by making use of the money AMA doled out after the winter storm.
Another path could have included shifting away from food delivery towards projects that addressed a need while simultaneously creating new relationships beyond the service provision model. Community gardens could have opened up new kinds of relationships with housed people supported by the mutual aid network; tending gardens offers a shared project to bring together activists and neighbors, which can help sustain households and open up relations of sharing with other neighbors. The vegetables grown could supply a broader network of food delivery and collective kitchens. A squatted garden in an occupied lot could offer space for unhoused people to camp and a rallying point to defend against gentrification.
We can’t know what path the movement should have taken. Actualizing any of these possibilities would have involved messy, situational questions. We can keep these horizons and strategic directions in mind for the next time we enter a similar cycle of struggle, but seizing these opportunities depends less on analytical precision than on our ability to strategize and plan in the midst of an emerging situation.
Conclusion: Partisans against the Coming Dispossession
The dwindling phase of the movement from spring 2021 into 2022 was a perfect storm of movement shrinkage, fragmentation, conflict, and escalating state repression, with each factor intensifying the others in destructive feedback loops. Economic pressures compounded the cumulative effects of over a year of intense movement activity, contributing to a buildup of tension, trauma, and burnout. Unaddressed emotional dynamics exploded around high-stakes contention following the freeze, worsening previous resentments. Escalating conflicts accelerated the process of decline as they consumed the movement’s limited capacity, while others who were less invested simply withdrew. The escalation of repression with the passage of the city camping ban, the statewide camping ban, and the scorched earth sweeps over the summer increased the pressure on the movement in the midst of these dynamics. Heightened urgency and stakes caused an even greater explosion of conflict as people took out their frustrations about the movement’s limited capacity on each other. Decline produces conflict produces decline; repression causes decline and conflict, which amplify the effects of repression. A vicious cycle in which we were the main actors, with our enemies largely in the background.
In addition to being our own worst enemies, our entire milieu was targeted by at least one bad actor using the moniker “Precious.” This person sought to map our traumas and fault lines, extract money, and exacerbate tensions. In the aftermath of the massive monetary windfall received by Austin Mutual Aid, a member of our collective began corresponding with the “Precious” Instagram account. “Precious” was later linked to a set of other accounts across social media that had targeted organizers across the South in Houston, New Orleans, and Atlanta using the same playbook of social mapping techniques and warped social justice language to call out organizations for various failings, real or invented. Several of these accounts were revealed to carry right-wing content if one scrolled back.
This episode was later documented and reported on by others using a dossier created by members of the impacted organizations. We mention this here to emphasize that when trust is already low and strategic thinking compromised, other actors will find ways to exploit the opportunities that open up.
Movements in decline must learn to lose better. That means clearly assessing our capacities, the conditions we are facing, and what is and is not possible. This can be a heavy task. Admitting defeats means accepting the grave consequences that come with them; in 2021, it would have meant admitting that we were no longer in a position to stop the sweeps and all the devastation they inflicted. We must grieve these losses while discerning what we can preserve from a phase of struggle in order to position ourselves for the next fight, wherever it emerges. Seeking to do this would shift our focus from desperate attempts to throw what little we have at our enemy to identifying which relationships, infrastructure, practices, and actions can equip us to lay the groundwork for the next phase of struggle. That approach could enable us to return to an asymmetrical conflict framework and to avoid getting locked into losing direct confrontations with our enemies. Strategic retreats, regrouping, and reorientation can enable a movement to continue taking the initiative instead of merely reacting, in order to be better prepared to intervene in the future.
Strategic thinking should not depend on the analytical, perceptive, or strategic capabilities of select individuals; it must become a political practice involving the entire movement. Even small gestures by crews and collectives articulating new principles and strategies can open a space for reflection. Collective infrastructure or practices can offer space for the movement to reflect on and adjust its activity, analyze changing landscapes, identify strategic opportunities and limitations, and release difficult emotions, tensions, and concerns. Such spaces can help build the strategic capabilities and emotional resilience of the movement. They can enable people to encounter each other across organizational or ideological lines, facilitating a circulation of ideas and strategies that can prevent the calcification of rigid ideological camps.
Such efforts can take various forms. In our experience, they included articulating a set of political principles and strategic interventions through sweeps defense in order to constitute another pole in a movement; building working relationships with a wide spectrum of actors, from factions within encampments to activist groups, in order to enable collaboration and the circulation of tactical insights; and assembling The Hive as a space for coordination, reflection, and proposing new directions. In The Hive, in particular, we see both positive examples and missed opportunities.
The relationships we built through the early Hive assemblies became the foundation of the early camp support network, which implemented some of the strategic conversations that had started in The Hive about neighborhood-based camp defense networks. This enabled the movement to level up at a critical moment. The Hive continued at a slow but steady rhythm through 2020, growing to include a wide range of factions at the height of the movement. However, by 2021, we had fallen out of practice. Assemblies saw less attendance as people focused on more urgent day-to-day work and meetings, and we put less effort into facilitating or reinvigorating them. By the time that the movement began to fracture and decline, there was no dedicated space or practiced rhythm for processing, addressing tensions, or big picture strategy discussions. Without dedicated infrastructure for facilitating these conversations, most organizations simply focused on the immediate needs of their particular project.
Continuing The Hive might not have resolved these problems. Strategic thinking is a habit that must be practiced and built into the rhythms of our work. We can offer a space for it, but that doesn’t guarantee that others in the movement will accept the invitation. If participants do not take it seriously, or cannot dedicate time to it due to the demands of their projects, the benefits will be limited. Nonetheless, such infrastructure has value even if only a minority of movement participants utilize it. It can still position them to make more effective interventions and proposals, holding open the window for strategic thinking and initiative. We must move from diagnosing our movement’s crises in the aftermath of their collapse to actively experimenting with ways to overcome their limits.
Those who participate in future cycles of struggle will continue to grapple with these questions. How can autonomous mutual aid efforts use the opening of a disaster and their ability to out-organize government responses to further undercut the legitimacy of the state and the economy? If we understand daily life within capitalist social relations as a constantly simmering crisis, how might projects that arise in reaction to acute crises (such as COVID-19 and the winter storm) maintain their initiative as the window of the disaster closes? How do we move away from a unidirectional, service-oriented model of activism to a model that generates new social relationships and communal infrastructure for meeting shared needs? How can mutual aid and crisis response enable a movement to take the offensive? There is no single right answer or right tactic; what counts is the ability to pose the necessary questions, stay creative, and take the initiative.
We believe the questions we grappled with will reappear because the struggle against sweeps is a harbinger of the struggles against precarity, dispossession, and displacement to come. We have already seen the encampments reappear in the refugee camps around Gaza and the solidarity encampments on college campuses in the United States—where, in Austin, some have experimented with using Signal to transcend some of the limits we discuss here. The camp is an image of the future—a future in which increased economic precarity, climate crises, wars, and state repression produce new waves of displacement and migration, and new forms of repression and managerial governance arise in response. Migrant caravans form tent cities at the border, facing the brutality of Border Patrol and police alongside the bureaucracy of the immigration system and resettlement programs; migrants bussed to New York end up circulating between camps and shelters, facing the brutality of sweeps and the bureaucracy of NGO management alongside a precarious working class that already cannot find sustainable employment or afford rising rents due to waves of gentrification.
As these crises intensify, the question of insurgent survival appears on the horizon. We need to organize collective sustenance and dignity in the face of the dispossessions to come—and to do so in ways that will undermine and fragment the forces of the state and capital. To do so, we will have to act both from within and alongside the ranks of the precarious and dispossessed and to join forces with the forms of insurgent self-organization that emerge, such as encampments and migrant caravans. The question is how to simultaneously survive the crises inflicted by the prevailing order with dignity while throwing it into crisis in a way that enables us to explore new ways of living.
—Some former members of Stop the Sweeps ATX
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The successes, limits, and lessons of 400+1 are not our story to tell. We encourage our comrades who participated in that organization to publish their own reflections. ↩