As the comrades at subMedia put it, we’re in a period of interrebellium. The LA revolt rekindled memories of the 2020 uprisings, but the upheaval hasn’t spread… yet. Discontent runs high, the polarization is unprecedented, and we have every reason to believe that the fires of Los Angeles will soon be joined by others. In the meantime, how do we orient ourselves and our movements? Are we forced to just wait for the next uprising to appear? Or are we to content ourselves with reformist advocacy efforts as right-wing authoritarianism encircles civil society? To provide another answer, I’d like to take a step back. Come with me, if you dare, to 2011.

The occupation before Occupy

At the height of the Great Recession, spontaneous anti-capitalist encampments emerged in the hearts of cities across the United States. If you’re a leftist in the contemporary United States, you probably owe a debt of gratitude to the folks sleeping in parks and city squares for a couple of weeks in fall 2011, because before Occupy Wall Street, words like “class” and “income inequality” were basically prohibited in mainstream political discourse. There would be no Sanders campaign without Occupy, no resurgence of the previously-moribund DSA or PSL, either. Occupy didn’t “win,” but it radically transformed social possibilities in a way that’s hard to explain if you weren’t there.

Since there was no central coordinating body, Occupy encampments varied a lot depending on the people involved and political and organizing culture of each city. But all shared several features:

1. Encampment, meaning a group of people not only meeting but living full-time in a liberated zone;

2. Disruption, situating encampments in central areas to disrupt commerce and everyday life; and

3. Anti-capitalism, a radical critique of market economics, often focused on austerity-driven budget cuts.

Disruptive, semi-permanent, anti-capitalist tent cities were not previously a part of American political culture, especially at a time when even acknowledging that there are rich and poor people in the United States seemed subversive. That’s why Occupy marked such a profound break. The encampments lasted only a handful of weeks before nationwide coordinated police raids cleared them out at gunpoint, but they radically shifted the Overton Window in a way that’s reverberated over the subsequent decade and a half.

Occupy was a transformative moment in the same way as the George Floyd Rebellion, another period when political possibility radically expanded with dizzying speed. Over the course of about a week in 2020, abolishing the police and the carceral state became a mainstream political position—contentious and ultimately unpopular position, to be sure, but one that was previously excluded from polite conversation entirely.

But that doesn’t mean Occupy was entirely unprecedented. In 2009, University of California students launched a wave of campus occupations against a 32% tuition increase. While protests varied by campus, they shared all the structural features of later Occupy protests: encampment, disruption, and an anti-capitalist critique of austerity measures. They, in turn, looked to the previous occupations of the New School in NYC and Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago.

The 2009 California tuition hike protests didn’t change American society. But they refined the model of something that would. Similarly, the George Floyd Rebellion followed years of protest development following the 2013 murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida and the Ferguson Uprising the next year. Maybe we will one day look at the LA Uprising as a similar premonition. Revolts aren’t silver bullets. They’re practice for what’s to come.

Capacity, progression, rupture

When the George Floyd Rebellion really kicked off, political formations were ready to deploy capacities that they had developed years before. Across the country, we had the infrastructure to launch bail funds and deploy court support. Our movements had knowledge about best practices for street medics and how to provide street medic trainings at scale. We had radical media collectives and networks of filmmakers and journalists ready to hit the ground.

When Occupy Wall Street became a true mass movement, it took advantage of preexisting knowledge and skills, as well. There was a global network of people familiar with consensus-based decision-making from the alter-globalization movement on the late 90s. Zapatista solidarity campaigns provided a framework for thinking through internationalism and horizontal organizations. Street medics, movement media, and court support were already circulating in radical social movements. “Spontaneous” movements may not follow a centralized master plan, but if they are to succeed, a lot of planning has to have already happened.

What are the capacities we can develop now to have ready when the next rebellion comes? What if we assessed our political strategies by running the clock backwards: thinking of what capacities we’d want to have in a moment of rupture, and then figuring out how to make them real?

Because when it’s really hot, our movements won’t be the only ones springing into action. The Democrats and NGOs will stand ready to defuse popular confrontation and pull energy out of the streets and into the ballot boxes, just like opportunistic left sects will try to demobilize the movement to swell their membership rolls. The far right and law enforcement are actively developing their capacities to physically repress social movements and oppressed communities.

Now is not a time for despair. It’s a time to prepare. If we want the next revolt to succeed, we need to be developing movement capacities today.

Tasks for our movements

These aren’t rules, guidelines, or a recipe. Treat them like prompts: if they’re useful, deploy them. If they aren’t, move on. But if we’re trying to develop movement capacities from where we are today, these could be ways to approach the question.

1. Link up. Form an affinity group, a collective of like-minded people willing to engage in action together. This could be a formation of like-minded people within a broader campaign, an ad-hoc mutual aid or propaganda initiative, or a discussion or study group.

2. Map power. What are the most powerful institutions and industries where you live? Where are the strategic choke-points? How do local actors connect to national and transnational efforts like mass deportation, the prison-industrial complex, or the genocide in Gaza?

3. Map the movement. What capacities do local social movements possess? Is there jail support, movement media, mutual aid, or street medic collectives? What missing capacities could be developed that might prove useful in a movement of rupture? How are movements connected to different communities where you live?

4. Situate yourself. What capacities do you already possess? Think expansively. It could be extra money at the end of the month, a car or bike, or language proficiency (including written English). It could be a network of family or friends, a spare couch where someone could crash, or access to institutional resources. How can you leverage the capacities you have to support movement work in the future?

5. Develop skills. This can be a collective or individual project, and can grow out of how you’ve situated yourself in the previous step. If you’re good with reading official documents, maybe you can provide court support. If you want to learn a language, maybe you can engage with an immigrant community. If there’s a movement capacity that needs developing, maybe you can form an affinity group to develop those skills together.

6. Prepare to engage. Nobody thought the next cycle of American revolt would start in the parking lot outside an LA Home Depot on a Friday morning. When the upheaval comes, we won’t be expecting it. This can be a framework for looking at capacity-building. When the uprising arrives, what are the skills we’ll be ready to deploy in the streets on Day 1?

The fires next time

Being situated between radical upheavals is no cause for dejection—unless we squander the opportunity given to us. That requires us to be serious, as serious at developing movement capacities as we are at developing our resumes, relationships, or beach bodies. It means preparation and work, just like a job application or exercise regimen.

Note that I said “serious,” not insufferable. Serious doesn’t mean sullen or humorless. As Michel Foucault wrote:

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

I’m not suggesting adopting an ascetic life of toil for The Revolution. I’m suggesting that we take seriously the joy we experience in collective revolt, and preparing together to maximize and execute it most effectively. When the fires return, let’s have a plan, let’s have a crew, and let’s be ready to win.

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This post has been syndicated from In Struggle, where it was published under this address.