Dispatch from the Zone 6.9.20

Last night marked the one day anniversary of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, the six or so blocks of Capitol Hill surrounding the Seattle Police Department East Precinct that had previously been a no-go zone for protestors. On Sunday, the East Precinct had been a fortress, surrounded on all sides with dozens of SPD officers, National Guardsmen, and State Patrol, armed with tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and batons. Concrete and metal barricades blocked the surrounding roads. A sniper was perched on at least one adjacent rooftop. Brutal, almost nightly dispersals of protesters had often left the neighborhood shrouded in a colored fog of tear gas, and had sent several activists to the hospital.

Two days later, barriers still blocked the road but now with new messages spray-painted and sharpied on them: “You are now leaving the United States,” “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,”“You are Entering Free Capitol Hill.” On Monday, after a week of standoffs, the police cleared the precinct of equipment and shredded reams of “confidential” documents and left. The East Precinct stands abandoned, the lower half boarded up, graffitied, and surrounded in chainlink. Someone has painted over the word “police” with the word “people”, rendering this block sized structure “Seattle People Department East Precinct.” A scrawled “No Trespassing” on what appears to be a piece of construction paper is taped to the front door. The lights upstairs are still on. There are stands offering free food and medical supplies right next to candle vigils. Armed men still patrol the street, but they are protesters, not police. Outside of the old precinct, speeches over loudspeaker intermingle with heated arguments between activists. 

It is easy from afar to condemn this all as exercise in playacting or LARPing, and, in fairness, there is an element of truth to this. After all, this is almost certainly not the kernel of a revolutionary movement. The Autonomous Zone will not spread across the country, or the state, or the city, or probably anywhere beyond its present “borders.” You are not, in fact, “leaving the United States,” and if you robbed or assaulted someone, the police would respond and put you in the same jail they would have a week ago. Whether it takes a week, or a month, or a year, the boards will come down, the cops will come back, the “People” will be scraped off of the “Police” and things will resume.

But why in a time of such hopelessness for the left are people so reluctant to just simply enjoy when good things happen? And a good thing has happened! Through political pressure, through courage in the face of a violent and unrestrained police force, through organizing, protesters, for the most part regular people, have forced the police to retreat. And it was a retreat, no amount of cynical hair-splitting will change this. This is not a military confrontation, it is a political one. The protesters were never going to overrun the precinct, but they made the situation untenable. The spectacle of nightly confrontations, the calls for Mayor Durkan to resign, the “tear gas ban” debacle, something had to give, and through their persistence  it was the police. In a country’s whose relationship to power is most often characterized by a sickening, boot licking servility, this is a victory. I have serious political disagreements with both anarchists and the BLM activists that made up most of the active edge of these demonstrations-many people on the left do. No matter where you are on the left, however, people feeling empowered, feeling more willing to question systems that have been normalized and made invisible -- these are good things.  We should allow ourselves to be heartened. These people accomplished something. They have every right to celebrate.

The biggest development of Tuesday night, however, didn’t wind up taking place in the Autonomous Zone, but right across the street at Cal Anderson Park. The preceding days had marked an increasing role for councilmember Kshama Sawant of Seattle’s Socialist Alternative Party (SA). After being absent, or low-profile in her involvement for the earlier protests, Sawant had begun to take on a bigger role, leading the charge on the Durkan resignation push and giving speeches to the crowd. Tuesday night, she made her move. SA, less visible than usual at the protests to this point, were out in full force. The main field of the park was packed from fence to fence with protestors, most carrying newly minted SA signs, cheering on speeches by Sawant, SA members and BLM activists. After their rally was over, they marched downtown, where Sawant unlocked the doors to city hall, leading to a brief occupation.

Sawant and SA, no matter your feelings about them, are good at this type of thing. Among groups that follow the Leninist model- a vanguard party that can act as the conscious element that guides previously spontaneous movements and uprisings- they have to be one of, if not the only one that actually succeeds every once and while. They know when to let things build up, and when they are able to step in. There are already grumblings about Sawant “hijacking” the movement, or diverting attention away from racialized police violence and towards existing SA campaigns, namely taxing Amazon.  But this is a mistake. Sawant and SA have correctly assessed that police violence is not a free floating issue or a matter of policy. They see racism as a creation and servant of capitalism and previous forms of economic domination. They see police brutality, as similarity inextricable from  large systems of domination, including American imperialism. A battle against racialized police violence has to also be a battle against the structures that sustain and support it. There is no hijacking, no diversion. Instead, they are taking this struggle as a serious fight that can be won. Racialized police violence is still the center focus, but a struggle against such violence has to take place on multiple fronts in order to be successful.

As I was leaving the demonstrations last night, I took one last walk through the heart of the Zone, in front of the East Precinct. There was a man, a young black activist, giving a passionate and angry speech to a cheering crowd. There had been plenty of speeches like this the past week. This time, however, the target of  this anger wasn’t the SPD -- it was Sawant, who was being condemned for only supporting defunding the SPD by fifty percent instead of a complete dismantling. This movement can and should keep going. But there is a real risk of dissolution and over a variety of tensions: how much do protesters accept Sawant’s increased role in this movement, how much value do they place on the maintenance of the Zone, and maybe most critically how do they respond to the incorporation of additional left demands to this movement.