THE STRATEGY
_ot COMPOSITION

LL WILL HUGH FARRELL
THE STRATEGY
OF COMPOSITION

HUGH FARRELL

 

Cover photograph by Marius Michusch
Reflux

We are living ehrough a moment of terrifying social reflux. The minimal
state protections put in place at the beginning of COVID have given way
to renewed evictions and a broad political consensus in favor of interest
rate hikes intended to tame inflation and rebuild markee stability. How-
‘ever, since, much of this inflationary instability is driven by new working
class purchasing power, this means that renewed market stability is tied
inexorably to restoring the precarity ofthe poor, to reducing their share of
‘consumption and breaking the job-seeking confidence that fed the Great
Resignation, itself produced by the exceptionally taut COVID labor mar-
ket

Just as the crisis-bred confidence of the poor must be tamed, so the
recent memory of vast anti-police struggles led by Black youth must be
painted over with delirious panics over Critical Race Theory and Defund
the Police, both as phantasmic as a mythical crime wave, Defund the Po-
lice, which appeared irrelevantly moderate during the George Floyd Up-
rising, now appears intolerably extremist thanks to the collusion of 10,000
talking heads who chattered their way through the entirety of 2022, even
as US police continued to kill people at an increased rate Since one good
panic begets another, these then fed a renewed hysteria about grooming,
which offers the barest fig leaf for a renewed exterminationist drive di-
rected against LGBT—especially trans—people. Propelled by figures like
Elon Musk (himself working precisely to restore conditions of profitable
speculation), this drive has been so shameless that it barely missed a beat
when one of its foot soldiers murdered five people in Club Q,a Colorado
gay bar.
Amid this period of fear and reflux, the movement to defend the At-
lanta forest—alongside recent efforts to defend the village of Liitzerath
against its destruction by mining giant RWE—stand out as bright excep-
tions. While the ostensible aim of both struy

 

es lies in protecting specific
territories, they have also succeeded in challenging the more general terms
of our current period of reaction. While my focus here will be on the
struggle in Adanta, the logic of composition outlined below may also help
co illuminate other ecologically-minded insurgencies across the globe.

Ofthe 600 coral acres being contested by the movement, 380 are slated
for development into an urban police counter-insurgency training center,
including a mock Black neighborhood, while the remaining 40 acres—
‘currently a city park—have been traded to a film industry soundstage de-
veloper through an insider deal. The slogan for the movement has thus
become, “No cop city / No Hollywood dystopia.”

While police defunding has become anathema across the US politi-
cal spectrum, by blocking the construction of a training facility needed
to raise the morale and update the tactics of a department shattered in
2020, the Defend the Forest movement is also defending and extending
the memory of the George Floyd Uprising

‘The movement is based less on protests—which do still occur fre-
‘quently at construction company offices and in downtown Atlanta, where
a group of elementary school children regularly demonstrate in solidari-
ty—than on forest raves and a patchwork of distinct camps. These 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. Young
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. Rolling Stone recently interviewed a young person who quie their
Midwestern office job at the tail end of the Great Resignation in order to
move to the forest, for reasons that seem obvious to many people of their
generation: “Ie seems simple, Work is hell. The forest is beautiful. The goal
of protecting what sustains us and destroying what destroys us is the most
imporeane thing”

“The forest occupation is hardly utopian, with frequent conflicts with-
in and between camps. Some neighbors opposed to Cop City, for exam-
ple, are understandably upset by obscene anti-police slogans daubed on a

 

6
parking lot occupied by the movement, since their children use the Forest
too. And yer, the inability to fall back on the mediation of insticutions has
forced participants to develop customs and practices of compromise and
conflict resolution. Further, the forest has become a refuge from the wave
of reaction sweeping the country. In a recent profile by David Peisner, one
transgender participant accounted for the “overrepresentation” of queer
and trans people in the forest in this way: “They're already marginalized
and have trouble operating in other spaces, so they're more likely to come
0 of

  

toa space like this. Also, trans people helped build this community
course they're going to make it more inviting for other trans people.””
‘While remaining riven by contradictions and difficulties, che Atlanta
forest has become an inverse image of the national political situation, an
exception in this period of reflux. One of the movement’ truisms, fee-
quently cited to account for its success, is that it is “decentralized and au-
tonomous” making it harder to police or co-opt, and creating space for
multiple modes of engagement. Yet Peisner is right to point out that this
structurelessness creates its own kind of rigidity and inertia. He quotes a
forest defender named Wiggly who acknowledges that in a movement like
this, “the way you're moving is the way you keep moving."* Decentraliza-
sion and autonomy are not sufficient principles in themselves to account
for the movement's simultaneous resilience, creativity, and chaotic, collec-
tive intelligence. And in fact, Wiggly’s words would just as well describe
America’s committed lurch into decline and crisis; in an alseady anarchic
epoch, decentralization and autonomy are hallmarks of most political
forces, and hardly sufficient as a liberatory horizon. Beneath the move-
mene’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 coord

   

 

nates of our current, precatious moment and why it poses the “composi
tion problem” on an epochal scale. Then I will return to territorial strug-
gles in order to understand composition from the opposite direction, as

a situated strategy for organizing that is distinctive to our contemporary

 

conjuncture.
Orphans

In “Onward, Barbarians” their magisterial balance sheet of the era of
COVID and anti-police rebellion, Endnotes offers a framework for un-
derstanding the vast laxes of popular insurgency and anxious, bloody re-
action within our anarchic present. For Endnotes, precarity, the collapse
of political legitimacy, and an accelerating welter of confused identities
and struggles all take place “on the ground of a stagnating capitalism.”* A.
pie which is no longer growing not only provokes terrifying competition
over steadily shrinking portions, but also undermines progressive claims,
whether of the potential for market-driven development, the historic mis-
sion of the labor movement to deliver security to workers, or of national
‘communities ever offeringa shared better future. Monsters multiply, com-
ppeting to foist blame onto migrants and trans people, whether as part of
the direct competition over portions of the pic or to displace confusion
and fear into new panics.

In this context, insurgent movements are lost children, orphaned from
the organizational tradition of the historic left and bereft of the labor
movement's past legitimacy, shed over decades of concessions to the boss-
es and acceptance of growing employment precarity. Further, movements
are ensnared in a “confusion of identities” as various sectors of society
compete for resources and slowly lose coherence themselves, as evidenced
by the gap in Black leadership which the official Black Lives Matter o-
ganizations have dramatically failed to fil. Yet, Endnotes argues that this
confusion, and this orphanhood more broadly, are also productive, cre-
ating a field of experimentation which, for these precise reasons, is diff-
cult to represent and govern, Without an extant tradition or leadership to
draw on, movements exist in a permanently improvisational mode—cre-
ative, ungovernable, and yer 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. Move-
ments must produce their own basis for organization and new tools for
welding together the inereasingly heterogeneous sectors produced by the
precarious present—as this process becomes self-conscious, it becomes

 

compos
In Hinterland, his survey of the contemporary “terrain of class and

 

ion as a strategy.
conffict,” Phil Neel proposes a peculiar solution to the composition prob-
lem, one especially suited to the massive fluxes of movement now regular-
ly 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, par-

 

ticipants 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.”

‘his framework has both experiential and ethical force; it responds
to the composition problem on the level of the epoch. Anyone who has
participated in a 21st century revolution is familiar with the euphoric sol-
idarity that Neel evokes, a well as the lack ofa broader horizon orient-
ing thar solidarity. Writing within the absence of this horizon, or more
‘optimistically in ies infancy, 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 al-
ready-failing capitalist world.”

However, oaths of water tell us very lice about how to organize, and
they represent only the ethical distillation of those sequences of rapid ero-
sion which occur during vast movements and uprisings. These insurrec-
tional sequences hardly make up the majority of our lives, even in the con-
text of capitalise stagnation and growing instability. Thinking only from
within these moments constitutes its distorting trap, risking a politics of
urgency and sacrifice. Neel, for his part, fears the opposite—that outside
of revolutionary sequences in which the oath of water is able to constantly
expand, the practice of revolutionaries will be distorted. Neel disparages
efforts to sustain long-term anti-capitalist spaces: “there is no true ‘auton-
‘omy’ from the world of capital, only fidelity to its destruction.”* His anx-
ieties go further, as he ambivalently aligns these spaces, surviving beyond
punctuated social eruptions, with “the nationalist or porto-nationalise
enclaves of populist movements in the global countryside,” suggesting

 

 

a further slippage towards exclusive communities at least akin co those
founded on oaths of blood.

Neel is taking aim at an anarchist attachment co “small-scale moments

°
of self reproduction in squats and occupations." These are offen conser-
vatively-minded efforts to hold onto a limited area of freedom on the part
of groups thar have already been constituted, whether by shared subcul-
ture, ideology, or an experience of movement participation. The goal in
these cases isto hold on, to survive in a localist or ideological mode. Un-
fortunately, Neel conflate these limited, small-group experiments with a
form of struggle—territorial defense—that grows out of the contempo-
rary epoch just as surely as the rapid, erosive insurrections with which he
is primarily concerned.

Territory

Even as capitalise growth slows, it is also increasingly clear that this
growth drives the climate crisis. The world is not just stagnating, bur itis
also warming, and the economic instability driven by the slowing growth
machine is neatly mirrored by the climatic instability often evoked under
the epochal banner of the “Anthropocene.” This dynamic drives the po-
iticization of ecological questions alongside economic questions, to such
an extent that, as 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." Beneath the drum beat of horrors in
this period of reflux isthe always-present awareness of the worsening cli-
mate crisis, highly resistant to any reformist amelioration, now joined by
the parallel, grindingly intractable COVID crisis.

On the one hand, the climate crisis sharpens the sense of ecological
loss in every local development controversy, at the same time as it raises
the stakes. On the other hand, an entire generation facing high unemploy-
ment rates and the collapse of institutional legitimacy has sensitized itself
to these losses and has, especially since the 2008 housing crisis, responded
evermore sharply to formerly local controversies. Finally, the interweav-

 

 

ing of the experience of anti-racist and anti-police movements helps push
the latter beyond their historical limitations within an “environmentalist”
framework, with the result that, as histories of colonization and state vi-
lence are revealed, these struggles now become territorial, pushing the
{questions of land and power to the fore.

‘The largest contemporary territorial struggle in the US has so far been

0
the blockade of the Dakota Access Pipeline. At its height, it grouped
together 10,000 people in a decentralized constellation of camps on
the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Native memories of colonial vio-
lence swirled together with grievances against contemporary colonial
extraction and the risk of local oil spills all framed by a widely-shared
certainty that the carbon economy undermines the conditions of life on
earth, The No-DAPL struggle was the largest political mobilization of
Native people in generations, many of whom remain outside the scope
of the settler nation. In addition to necessitating serious experiments in
social reproduction outside the circuits of capitalism, the movement also
‘engaged in a forceful exclusion of the police and military from the camps,
thereby resurrecting the specter of autonomy.

‘The autonomy built at Standing Rock, however, bore no resemblance
to the static, closed refuges criticized by Neel. There was a vast and con-
stant flow of bodies, goods, ideas and strategies through the camps, fed
by multiple social strata each of which arrived with their own distinct ex-
periences of being rendered surplus to the economy. Native people, sub-
stantially excluded from the waged economy or relegated to its lowest,
rural rungs across widely-dispersed reservations, used the Standing Rock
‘camps asa space of regroupment. Settlers, disproportionately young and
hailing from a generation defined by precarious employment, flocked to
the camps to support Native claims, to fight a carbon economy that holds
them hostage as well, or simply (for many) because they had nothing better
10 do, While theit exposure to precarity, as service workers or indebted
college graduates, is structurally distinct from that of Native people con-
fined to impoverished reservations, the end of Fordist carcer certainties
allowed thousands of seteler youth to spend months at a time camping in
the plains of North Dakota, building defensible structures, participating
in ceremony, or fighting the police. Why not quit a Starbucks job, which
lacks security or any possibility of advancement, and live almost withoue
money? How else can we renew that ethical substance which long ago
disappeared from the normally-functioning metropolis?

“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." 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. However, as Ross
pointedly reminds us, although both are undoubredly born of a common
conjuncture, they have distinct logies and temporalities which we would
do well to distinguish.

Transvaluation

As Ross rightly insists, a key elemene of territorial struggles is a “trans-
valuation of values.” Whereas Neel is right to claim that, in the flood of
insurrection, itis unrest itself that binds participants together, territorial
struggles differ in thar there is something worth defending. Paradoxically,
though, it is often only through the struggle that participants come to
feel this confidently, that they are able to assert that a place can be “given
value according to a measurement that is different from market-value or
the state’ list of imperatives, or existing social hierarchies."

“The defense of a territory is a constructive process that necessarily in-
cludes more people as it unfolds, yet which proceeds through a complete-
ly different temporality than that of riots or mass uprisings. Alongside
Standing Rock, a paradigmatic example is the Zone & Defendre (ZAD) at
Notre-Dame-des-Landes. The ZAD is a mass occupation that successfully
blocked the construction of a second airport outside Nantes, France. The
territorial phase of the struggle took shape gradually over ten year period
from 2008 until its eventual victory in 2018, and has since continued to
nourish collective experiments on the Zone to this day."* The participant
research collective Mauvaise Troupe, which has written extensively about
territorial struggles across Europe, emphasizes their sequential logic:

 

 

I quickly became apparent that defending these wetlands was insepa-
rable from inhabiting, nourishing, and building forms of resistant in
frastructure within and upon them, and that all of these efforts were at
‘odds with the existing economic and governmental structures."*

    

Here we glimpse the complex temporality of composition, which extends
both backwards and forwards, combining speed and slowness. On the
‘one hand, transvaluation and defense tend to noutish each other, as the

2
struggle to defend demands the production of new truths and collective
intelligence. In this way, the exigencies of defense instill the impecus and
urgency for the steady growth of a movement. At the same time, territori-
al struggles are hybrid temporalities that resurrect and continue lineages
of past antagonisms, sometimes decades or centuries in the making. The
opposition to the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes developed over the
course of 40 years before its territorial occupation in 2008, while Standing
Rock drew upon centuries of anti-colonial struggle. Although propelled
forward by a creative impulse, territorial defense is also slower than it may

 

at first appear.

‘Whether we consider Notre-Dame-des-Landes or North Dakora, in
‘each case it was the contemporary conjuncture of economic and climactic
crisis, alongside the new political conditions defined by systemic delegiti-
mation, that allowed long-duration struggles to scale up. This delegitima-
tion is key for understanding the emergence of the compositional style
of struggle. Over the past half century, the dominance of the proletariat
has eroded both from without and within. Externally, the proletariat has
been shrunk and scattered through capitalise reorganization and precar-
ization, during the same period that it was challenged internally by fem-
ues, exposing always-latent and

 
 

st, anti-racist, and anti-colonial crit
unresolved contradictions concealed within the identity of the working
class, which now finds itself embedded within a much more flexible cap-
italism than that of the Fordist factory period. If the left can no longer

 

claim to extrapolate a stable program, this is not due solely to the water-
ing-down of its supposedly “core” Marxist values by postmodernist criti-
cisms of neoliberalism, but rather because, at a material level, there is no
longer any reasonable claim to an homogenous, shared experience that
could serve as its foundation.

Wilderness
‘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 capitalise reproductive circuit which has shed the stable

 

character required for stable subjects to advocate in ordered ways for a

8
given portion of social goods. Atlanta is a paradigmatic New South ex-
ample. 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, ic, 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 truth on which our politics depends, it cannot be the “scien-
tific” ruth of the old orthodoxies, but must be situated in an irreducibly
intersubjective space. From here on our, all truths ate situational

‘The grassroots left after che fll of the Berlin wall recognized this im-
plosion, yet failed to overcome it. On the one hand, during the 1990s and
2000s, che activist strategy for resolving differences and maintaining coa-
livions within social movements was consciously post-programmatie and

 

flexible, It didn’t look to “scientific” dialectics to resolve contradictions
between sections of the movement, nor did it appeal to the existence of
a natural or historical vanguard. Rather than let differences tear it apart,
activists in the anti-globalization movement proposed that summit pro-

versity

 

tests be organized in accordance with a principle they called th
+ all che sections of the movement can act as they see fit, sepa-

   

of tactics
rately. 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 Princi-
ples”) a “Separation of time and space.” As a result, whenever any move-
ment-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. ‘This liberal concept of “autonomy” as
tolerance-amidst-separation mirrors the atomized structure of neoliberal
citizenship. In the end, it allowed the most conservative sections of the
movement to cunningly reestablish their dominance through the back
door. In 2003, AFL-CIO operatives, ina painful example, used “diversity
of tactics” as a justification to isolate a large black bloc in a distant corner
of Miami, miles away and hours before the mass protests against the Free

uw
Trade Area of the Americas, allowing police to crush and arrest hundreds
of anarchists

“Today, che legacy of the 20th century left bequeaths to usa sad binary:
‘on one side, there isthe classical labor movements singular program, with
its dialectical resolution of difference, and its dependence on the leader-
ship of anow-extinet mass subject; on the other, the contemporary activist
approach, itself based on the prioritization of tacts, the non-resolution
of difference, and the abandonment of any strategic horizon of victory.

Composition asa strategy positions itself between these ewo extremes.
“The negative rationale for its development resides in the disappearance of
any leading identiey, which forces movements—propelled as they are by
the contradictions of capitalist society—into a productive crisis,

However, it also has a positive rationale, Whereas the programmatic
approach co 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 composi-
tion proposes that the multiple segments of a movement remain multiple,
while simultaneously weaving the necessary practical alliances between

 

them, Given the failure of any given identity to convincingly assert social
leadership within movements, the various social figures that make up con-
temporary struggles are faced with a choice: either they can remain in au-
tarchic non-relation (tolerant separation), or else, if they wish to restore a
horizon of victory, they must develop relational approach allowing them
to work together across their differences, and this inevitably means ac-
cepting compromises. “Composing” as a practice means holding togeth-
cer and expanding the relations between social sectors of a struggle, and
“composition” as a strategy refers to the assumption that a collective vie-
tory under current conditions is only possible provided our movements
find ways to tease out such collaborative meshworks across and between
various social identities, However, this is not merely a coalition of differ-
ent 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, che assumption is that,
in order to win, each segment must commit to a contextual form that in-

 

 

6
vites all the other pieces of the movement to destabilize the identity and
‘commitments that they may otherwise have held in normal capitalise pol-
itics. In chis way, composition produces not “social unity” but a practical
machine fueled by the partial desubjectification of its constituent parts.
For example, as the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline grew
‘over the course of 2016, it went from a narrow movement of the Standing
Rock Sioux for their own territorial rights to one in which other Indige-
nous groups and non-Indigenous actors also fele implicated, for their own
material and political reasons. Acknowledging this fact does not require
that we subsume or disregard the interests and position of the Standing
Rock Sioux; the point is rather chat it was the compositional logic of the
movemenc that pulled all chese components into relation with each other,

 

leading to a greater horizon of vietory than any could imagine on their
Let us now return to the case of Atlanta Defend the Forest strug-
gle. 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 physi
" Te seems that such a formulation describes

 

cal territory, a living space.
the Atlanta forest precisely. The movement is not simply “decentralized
and autonomous,” which would only evoke a series of disconnected and
indifferent elements scattered however far from each other. Instead, the
constellation of camps in the forest, as well as the various social segments
that populate the movement—the elementary schoolchildren and their
parents, visitors from outside Atlanta, the ravers, the community organiz-
cersand canvassersin the surrounding Black neighborhoods, rans activists
and naturalists—are as marked by their connections and their relations
as much as by their decentralization. To experience the movement is not
merely to experience one’s own distinct view upon it, or one’ own menu
of practices within it, but also to feel claimed by the wagers, risks, and
contributions ofall the other component pieces as well, with whom one
shares a common fate.

Separation is the norm in a hyper-alienated and violent society like
America, and even more so in radical politics. The fact that such a range
‘of components as listed above, and the range of methods they each imple-
ment, are connected in a struggle is therefore an exception to the norm,

6
and requires constant suasion. To put in terms borrowed from the Span-
ish 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 polities." A huge
proportion of the movement to defend the Atlanta forest takes place out-
side the forest itself, meaning that activities with radically different char-
acters must be constantly sutured together, between the varying ehythms
‘of neighborhood canvassing, protests downtown, and life in the camps.
“The challenge of building effective coordination in a hyper-separated
society in the absence of any larger positive horizon is vast. Composition
is the mode of organization in profoundly disordered times. As a poctic

 

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
lise 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 re-
main tolerantly separated, but instead have continuously sought to
remain connected, in part thanks to the work of informal liaisons
who attempt to resolve differences in real time as they surface.

«The movement's open approach to political methods stresses not
just a diversity of tacties, but their potential interlinking. This
allows lawsuits to coexist with regular clashes with police at the
cedge of the forest, and for participants from a dizzying range of
American subcultures (birdwatchers, ravers, academies, activists,
history buffs, punks, tenderqueers, carpenters, etc. to enter the
movement and define their own participation within it based on

 

their own resources and desires.

+ By maintaining an open approach to the construction of the
camps, the movement prioritizes pragmatic and hands-on activ-

is. In this way, it deactivates ideological questions and divides,
allowing for the type of disidentification described by Ross. This
facilitates creative engagement and reduces the insularity of activ-

7
8

ist practices. The new kitchen building built in che parking lor-
turned camp, dubbed “Weclaunce People’s Park” (destroyed by
police and corporate bulldozers December 13 2022, and already
being rebuile) has played exactly this role, hosting potlucks every
‘Wednesday throughout the autumn of last year.

An emphasis on land restoration and building places of life con
tributes to a broad transvaluation of values, articulating a new

   

basis for organizing and coordinating in defense of this particular
place, in its singularity. Efforts by forest defenders and many oth-
ers to unearth the murderously racist history of the Old Atlanta
Prison Farm builds new connections between past and present
struggles. Planting fruit trees and edible perennial herbs reveals
the sustaining power of the territory, New traditions emerge spe-
cific to the forest, and provide a basis for new forms of connection
and kinship.

Multiple components display a compositional intelligence, in-
vesting serious political effort and affective virtuosity to resolve
conflicts and draw in new components. For example, a contro-
versy over the obscene graffiti slogans has been slowly addressed
through conversation and debate, and importantly, through
the constant addition of new slogans, tags, and art, rather than
through a fruitless effort co simply censor the tags (in whose name
could the censorship occur?). 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...” More importantly than the tags, others have worked to
support the Muscogee people, indigenous to the region, re-enter-
ing the forest two centuries after cheir expulsion, leading to im-
portant rituals, encounters, and transmission of knowledge about
the territory.

‘A sense of patience and taking the movement's own time has
meant nor 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. As the
national left embarrassingly tacks this way and that, trying to deny
the anti-racist commitments it made at the height of the 2020
movement (which had quickly become an electoral vulnerability),
the territorial nature of this struggle allows it to move on a.com
pletely different timeline, resolutely opposing the police and their
world.

 

We can see how the broader conditions of crisis, as well as the mass
experience of rapid bursts of erosive social conflicts ofthe sort emphasized
by Neel all structure the Atlanta forest movement and its components;
and yet although it operates upon the ground of capitalise stagnation and
crisis, it continues to move within its own distinct compositional tem-
porality and logic. This is a slower logic, but one that grows and contrib-
tutes to whatever nascent political horizon is emerging from the global
sequence of struggles all failed so far, which beset the planet in this time
of flux and reflux. Just as Standing Rock redefined the horizon of climate
movements, raising the legacy of colonization at the same time that it po-
livicized infrastructure construction, the Atlanta forest has become not
just a refuge from a reactionary moment but a testing ground for bot-
tom-up ecological resilience and abolitionist politics. The movement’s
compositional intelligence must confront not only Cop City and Holly-
wood Dystopia, but behind them, central pillars of capitalise planning vi-

olently enforcing precarity and seeking a renewed basis for accumulation.

 

°
6

6
v
9

2

Notes

Police Shootings Database, Washington Por.
Jack Crosbie, "The Bate for Cop City” Rolling Stone, Sep 3,202

David Peisner, "The Fores forthe Tees” The Bister Southerner, December 13, 2022.
Peisner, “The Fores forthe Tree

Endnotes Collective, "Onwatd, Barbarians”

Phil Necl, Hinterland, Reaktion Books, 2018, 155

Nee, Hinterland, 16

[Neel Hinterland, 156

[Necl, Hinterland, 175

Nee, Hinterland, 175

Kristin Ross, "The Long 1960s and the Wind from the West" Criss and Critique, Vol. 5,
Issue.

Joshus Clover, Rot, Srike, Riot, Vers, 2016

Ross, "The Long 1960s" 325

“Mauvase Troupe. "Remaining Ungovernable” Lecture atthe 1U“Undercommons and Des-
‘ieuent Power” Conference.

“Mauvaise Troupe, "Remaining Ungovernable” Fora broader portralt, see Mauvaise Troupe,
Constellations: Trajctoiesévlutionnaires da jeune 2h cle, cats, 2017

Ros, "The Long 1960s" 331

‘Andy Merrifield, The New Urban Question, Pato, 2014, 17

Precarias ala Deiva,"A Very Caeful Strike

‘Anonymous, “The Siege ofthe Third Precinct in Minneapolis” Crimethins, Jane 10,2020,
a
The challenge of building effective coordination
ina hyper-separated society in the absence of
any larger positive horizon is vast. Composition
is the mode of organization in profoundly
disordered times.

 

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