The Strategy of Composition

“From Standing Rock to Lützerath, the struggle to defend the Earth continuously crosses over into the construction of the commune”

“Situating the battle to defend Atlanta’s forests within the collapse of the historical left and the rise of place-based or “territorial” forms of struggle, Hugh Farrell surveys the possibility of revolutionary organization in profoundly disordered times”

“Amid this period of fear and reflux, the movement to defend the Atlanta forest — alongside recent efforts to defend the village of Lützerath against its destruction by mining giant RWE (from which the accompanying images here are taken) — stand out as bright exceptions”

“While my focus here will be on the struggle in Atlanta, the logic of composition outlined below may also help to illuminate other ecologically-minded insurgencies across the globe”

“various camps allow for a range of people to engage in differentiated ways, while making the movement harder to map and evict for the authorities”

“people from across Atlanta and the country circulate through the forest, some staying for a few nights while others have lived there for more than a year”

"”It seems simple. Work is hell. The forest is beautiful. The goal of protecting what sustains us and destroying what destroys us is the most important thing.””

“inability to fall back on the mediation of institutions has forced participants to develop customs and practices of compromise and conflict resolution”

“While remaining riven by contradictions and difficulties, the Atlanta forest has become an inverse image of the national political situation, an exception in this period of reflux”

“Decentralization and autonomy are not sufficient principles in themselves to account for the movement’s simultaneous resilience, creativity, and chaotic, collective intelligence”

“in an already anarchic epoch, decentralization and autonomy are hallmarks of most political forces, and hardly sufficient as a liberatory horizon”

“Beneath the movement’s commitment to remaining “decentralized and autonomous” lies another active principle, which has emerged in territorial struggles and situated conflicts around the world: composition”

“In what follows, I will draw on Endnotes and their interlocutors to define the broader coordinates of our current, precarious moment and why it poses the “composition problem” on an epochal scale”

“In “Onward, Barbarians,” their magisterial balance sheet of the era of COVID and anti-police rebellion, Endnotes offers a framework for understanding the vast fluxes of popular insurgency and anxious, bloody reaction within our anarchic present.”

“Endnotes argues that this confusion, and this orphanhood more broadly, are also productive, creating a field of experimentation which, for these precise reasons, is difficult to represent and govern.”

“Without an extant tradition or leadership to draw on, movements exist in a permanently improvisational mode — creative, ungovernable, and yet internally unstable”

“This poses what Endnotes calls the “composition problem,” in which contemporary movements can assume no automatic, shared basis, and thus face new challenges”

“Movements must produce their own basis for organization and new tools for welding together the increasingly heterogeneous sectors produced by the precarious present — as this process becomes self-conscious, it becomes composition as a strategy”

“In Hinterland, his survey of the contemporary “terrain of class and conflict,” Phil Neel proposes a peculiar solution to the composition problem, one especially suited to the massive fluxes of movement now regularly produced by the destabilizing global order”

“He argues that reactionary forces are propelled by “oaths of blood,” in which racial and traditionalist myths nourish new communities of exclusion intended to offer security amid generalizing stagnation and destabilization”

“Opposed to this, participants in insurgent movements make no exclusive claim, and instead make an inclusive pledge to insurgency itself, an “oath of water” to Marx’s “‘Party of Anarchy’ that seems to seek nothing but further erosion, the growth of the flood.””

“Neel understandably emphasizes a “fidelity to the unrest itself,” in a way which ethically orients us towards inclusive communities and a negative project based on the destruction of the already-failing capitalist world”

“However, oaths of water tell us very little about how to organize, and they represent only the ethical distillation of those sequences of rapid erosion which occur during vast movements and uprisings”

“Neel disparages efforts to sustain long-term anti-capitalist spaces: “there is no true ‘autonomy’ from the world of capital, only fidelity to its destruction.””

“Neel is taking aim at an anarchist attachment to “small-scale moments of self-reproduction in squats and occupations.””

“These are often conservatively-minded efforts to hold onto a limited area of freedom on the part of groups that have already been constituted, whether by shared subculture, ideology, or an experience of movement participation”

“The goal in these cases is to hold on, to survive in a localist or ideological mode”

“Unfortunately, Neel conflates these limited, small-group experiments with a form of struggle — territorial defense — that grows out of the contemporary epoch just as surely as the rapid, erosive insurrections with which he is primarily concerned”

“Kristin Ross has declared, “defending the conditions for life on the planet has become the new and incontrovertible horizon of meaning of all political struggle.””

“The autonomy built at Standing Rock, however, bore no resemblance to the static, closed refuges criticized by Neel”

“There was a vast and constant flow of bodies, goods, ideas and strategies through the camps, fed by multiple social strata each of which arrived with their own distinct experiences of being rendered surplus to the economy”

“The demographic parallels — the encounter of the racially excluded and the newly precarious — between riots and blockade camps led Joshua Clover to assimilate the two in his Riot, Strike, Riot.12 For Clover, both belong to that category of antagonism he terms “circulation struggles,” which are born out of capitalist stagnation, slack labor markets and the growing importance of circulation vis-a-vis production”

“The defense of a territory is a constructive process that necessarily includes more people as it unfolds, yet which proceeds through a completely different temporality than that of riots or mass uprisings”

“Alongside Standing Rock, a paradigmatic example is the Zone à Defendre (ZAD) at Notre-Dame-des-Landes”

“The participant research collective Mauvaise Troupe, which has written extensively about territorial struggles across Europe, emphasizes their sequential logic:

It quickly became apparent that defending these wetlands was inseparable from inhabiting, nourishing, and building forms of resistant infrastructure within and upon them, and that all of these efforts were at odds with the existing economic and governmental structures”

“The conditions under which we now organize are those of what Andy Merrifeld has called the “wild city,” the “deregulated city, the downsized city.””

“This is a capitalist reproductive circuit which has shed the stable character required for stable subjects to advocate in ordered ways for a given portion of social goods”

“Under such conditions, the role of the left can no longer be to teach people fixed truths and bring them into a stable coalition based on a pre-existing program. Political formulations based on a mass identity are no longer possible”

“Any possible program or strategic platform can no longer be unidirectional, but must instead be permeable, i.e., constitutively open to their outside, and perhaps even defined by it”

“In practical terms, this means that whatever our stakes in the fight are, we must be interested in other people’s experiences too, as well as their own reasons for being there”

“If there is a truth on which our politics depends, it cannot be the “scientific” truth of the old orthodoxies, but must be situated in an irreducibly intersubjective space”

“From here on out, all truths are situational”

“activists in the anti-globalization movement proposed that summit protests be organized in accordance with a principle they called the “diversity of tactics”: all the sections of the movement can act as they see fit, separately”

“The problem with this approach is that it effectively abandoned the possibility of a collective strategy or mode of organization. In order for each section of the movement to enact its tactical program during a mobilization, it must enjoy (according to the canonical “St. Paul Principles”) a “separation of time and space.””

“whenever any movement-wide discussion would occur, the focus would be on allowing each tactical program to be enacted without getting in each other’s way, rather than on winning in a broader sense”

“Today, the legacy of the 20th century left bequeaths to us a sad binary: on one side, there is the classical labor movement’s singular program, with its dialectical resolution of difference, and its dependence on the leadership of a now-extinct mass subject; on the other, the contemporary activist approach, itself based on the prioritization of tactics, the non-resolution of difference, and the abandonment of any strategic horizon of victory”

“Composition as a strategy positions itself between these two extremes”

“The negative rationale for its development resides in the disappearance of any leading identity”

“it also has a positive rationale. Whereas the programmatic approach to struggle relied upon dialectical resolution of conflicts — i.e., the assumption that, through the course of the struggle, a synthesis would emerge that would produce a new sort of unity — the method of composition proposes that the multiple segments of a movement remain multiple, while simultaneously weaving the necessary practical alliances between them”

““Composing” as a practice means holding together and expanding the relations between social sectors of a struggle, and “composition” as a strategy refers to the assumption that a collective victory under current conditions is only possible provided our movements find ways to tease out such collaborative meshworks across and between various social identities”

“this is not merely a coalition of different subjects, each of whom remains the same throughout. In order for this strategy to function in practice, in order to maintain the composition of a movement, each of its component parts must be willing to step away from their identities to some degree”

“The aim here is not to enter into some kind of new synthesis, erasing particularity; rather, the assumption is that, in order to win, each segment must commit to a contextual form that invites all the other pieces of the movement to destabilize the identity and commitments that they may otherwise have held in normal capitalist politics.”

“In this way, composition produces not “social unity” but a practical machine fueled by the partial desubjectification of its constituent parts”

“As Kristin Ross observes, composition struggles tend to produce a distinctive social base: “essentially a working alliance, involving mutual displacements and disidentifications, that is also the sharing of a physical territory, a living space.””

“To experience the movement is not merely to experience one’s own distinct view upon it, or one’s own menu of practices within it, but also to feel claimed by the wagers, risks, and contributions of all the other component pieces as well, with whom one shares a common fate”

“To put in terms borrowed from the Spanish radical collective Precarias a la Deriva, maintaining the transversal linkages that bind these components and methods requires an “affective virtuosity” characteristic of contemporary work and politics”

“Composition is the mode of organization in profoundly disordered times”

“As a poetic and compositional account from Minneapolis during the first days of the George Floyd Uprising put it: “We combine without becoming the same, we move together without understanding one another; and yet it works.””

“Under these hazy conditions, it might be helpful to articulate a partial list of compositional methods at play in the Atlanta forest:”

“Multiple camps have proliferated, which, although marked by starkly divergent cultures and populations, have not opted to remain tolerantly separated, but instead have continuously sought to remain connected”

“The movement’s open approach to political methods stresses not just a diversity of tactics, but their potential interlinking”

“By maintaining an open approach to the construction of the camps, the movement prioritizes pragmatic and hands-on activities. In this way, it deactivates ideological questions and divides”

“An emphasis on land restoration and building places of life contributes to a broad transvaluation of values, articulating a new basis for organizing and coordinating in defense of this particular place, in its singularity”

“Multiple components display a compositional intelligence, investing serious political effort and affective virtuosity to resolve conflicts and draw in new components”

“Composition necessarily functions less through internal correction within a coalition, than through the positive process of linking together new elements — it is a “yes, and…””

“A sense of patience and taking the movement’s own time has meant not only that each attempted eviction has been met with calm and resolve, but that the political winds buffeting the rest of the country are experienced at greater remove in the forest”

“the Atlanta forest has become not just a refuge from a reactionary moment but a testing ground for bottom-up ecological resilience and abolitionist politics”