Fighting for Memory

we’re condemned to repeat the mistakes we forget

They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us

In the university encampments that have made up a major part of the Palestine solidarity movement, an interesting observation came up: while those launching the encampments were often starting from scratch—learning for the first time how to organize sleeping spaces, communal cooking and food distribution, first aid tents, lending libraries, and jail support, whether to negotiate with the administration and how to defend against police attacks—the campus administrations have access to decades of experience managing campus protests, while the police can refer to well over a century of accumulated institutional knowledge.

Folks grow up in this society not knowing about the social war: that the very existence of the State constitutes a war against the planet and all its peoples. Even if they feel the existence of that war in their bones, because they’re targets of direct violence due to their race, their class, their gender, their nationality, their beliefs and actions, their existence as Indigenous people, they don’t hear anything about the concept of social war in the media, in school, even in social movements, which tend to be dominated by a “loyal opposition” that wants to reform the system to help it survive.

So, people are brought up believing in a “common sense” position that if something really unacceptable is happening in society, you should protest, expressing your opinion, communicating your opposition to those in power. Those who start an encampment understandably think it makes sense to negotiate the encampment with the school administration, because they have been given very few opportunities to understand that universities are businesses and institutions for the advancement of social control. The administration is their enemy.

If it weren’t tragic, it would be funny: the students engage in negotiation in good faith, whereas the administrations go off a playbook for protest management in which negotiation is just a delaying tactic to lead naïve students around by the nose until the semester ends and they all go home.

At this point, it’s a widely recognized fact that decentralized networks (like ecosystems, stateless societies) are more intelligent than centralized systems (like the State).¹ In our social movements, we’ve seen it play out before our eyes. In the first hours of a riot, people are like angry sheep, full of legitimate rage and good intentions, but so easy for the police to wipe the floor with. Within a few hours (or by the second day of rioting, in extremely democratic, economically advantaged societies), they have spontaneously developed complex techniques and with the materials they have at hand they can chase off the riot cops, armored vehicles, and helicopters of a well funded, well trained police force. Likewise, in moments of disaster, people develop complex networks of mutual aid within a few days, far more effective—and egalitarian—than the humanitarian relief of NGOs and states.

I’ve seen this play out again and again in the twenty-five years I’ve been participating in anarchist movements around the world. Our ability to learn, create, and adapt is as inspiring as it is beautiful. But time and again, we are defeated by our own mistakes, and the more I learn about the history of our struggles, the more I see the pattern: similar mistakes happening again and again.

The State enjoys immense resources: stolen from us and from the living ecosystems of this planet. It has a capacity for violent repression that far exceeds our capacity for counterviolence (and if we believe in liberation, we shouldn’t try to match or mimic the State within its own paradigm). But there are more of us, and if we refuse to join the cult of some political Party promising us the answers, if we refuse to relinquish our responsibility to imagine, to think, to create, to decide, to act, we can access that collective intelligence the cumbersome hierarchies of oppressive power fear so much.

The decisive factor is memory: collective, intergenerational memory. We start off at a huge disadvantage, taught false histories of our own past struggles, taught to believe in methods of resistance that disarm us from the very start, like nonviolence. (free pdf here)

What is it about capitalist society, police repression, and our own bad movement strategies, that causes us to lose our collective memory? What kind of actions, skill sets, and strategies could we employ in our struggles to allow for an intergenerational continuity? How can we avoid dogma, the list of correct lessons and vetted truths, which only stifles our creativity and intelligence, and instead nourish a relationship with our collective history that gives us a wealth of experiences to sharpen our analysis of the unique present?

These are the topics I address in my new book, which I’m really excited to announce today! I’ve been working on this for the last year, and though it’s been a really hard year (the one year anniversary of my brain surgery is tomorrow I think), it gave me a lot of hope to speak with anarchist and Indigenous comrades in a dozen countries around the world, sharing the lessons they’ve learned in decades of struggle, and exploring the lessons of earlier generations.

They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us, with Pluto Books. It’s available for pre-order now.

Anyone who is familiar with me or my work knows that I really don’t like selling my writing. It’s not a coincidence that everything I’ve ever published is available for free on the internet (theanarchistlibrary.org is a great source, send them a donation to support their project!), and I never kept the money from book sales until a couple years ago, with my health and economic situation getting more difficult.

But now I’m in my ‘40s with a couple of loose teeth, a slow moving brain tumor, a rent that’s only rising, and no credit history or savings, and honestly it would be kinda nice to be able to pay some of my bills with all the writing I do. But enough about me: pre-ordering can be a really important way to support independent publishers like Pluto, since books cost a lot of money to print up front, whereas sales money takes a long time to trickle back in.

It’s also important to help spread writing that comes from actual movement participants, from the grassroots, with actually radical analysis. Every now and then, when the plebes are causing too much trouble, the mainstream media will promote books that dress up an authoritarian, clueless, historically ignorant analysis as something radical. Whether it’s media-driven protest movements or new attempts to refurbish Marxism to take on challenges it already failed at its first few times around the block, the common denominator is clear, the common denominator is clear: the institutions of power will do everything they can to make sure we always place our hopes for the future in the hands of the State, and that our movements take their ideological guidance from upper middle class academics whose experience in the streets is anecdotal at best.

Below are some brief reviews of the book coming from movement thinkers, researchers, and fighters I really respect. Be sure to check out their work too if you’re unfamiliar!

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Maintaining and sharing revolutionary love, we strengthen intergenerational memories of creative resistance. Despite the beatings and burnings meted out by states, schools, corporations, police, prisons and militaries, our communities continue to weave overlapping concentric circles of care and resistance. This striking book reveals collective memories of freedom struggles, despite attempts to blur, distort or steal our inheritance.'

Joy James, editor of Beyond Cop Cities

Peter Gelderloos reminds us that for our survival, we must keep the flame of memory alive, ensuring that the radical roots of our movements are not whitewashed by the gatekeepers of history. In remembering, we resist; in forgetting, we risk erasing our future.
Franklin Lopez, anarchist filmmaker, founder of subMedia

A much-needed intervention in this time of profound loss and erasure, They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us is an impassioned counterattack against forgetting. An inspiring, intergenerational invitation to dig deep for a “memory of our roots” of resistance. A dogged assertion that without collectivizing remembrance—as place, as storytelling and dialogue, as social and ecological relations—we can neither learn from our mistakes nor mend ourselves, neither unassimilate from their world nor engage in liberatory world-building of our own. Woven together from street-smart rebel voices, Gelderloos’s book is a powerful read from start to finish.
Cindy Milstein, editor of Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice

Once again, Peter Gelderloos offers us an important book coming from the frontlines of numerous struggles. A must read for all aspiring trouble makers and those wanting to free themselves from the grips of exploitation and state terrorism. While the authorities try to terrorize people into forgetting who they are, and what really matters, Gelderloos offers us memory, discussion and care to transform the world, but our ourselves and neighborhoods which is where it all begins.
Xander Dunlap, Research Fellow at Boston University and author of This System is Killing Us

A bold, eloquent, and timely account of the powerful role collective memory plays in toppling the lies that uphold structures of injustice and inequality. Gelderloos brings into sharp relief the urgency of building social movements that have continuity and intergenerational memory. The social movement novice and the seasoned veteran alike will find this book a useful tool to think with.
Tariq D. Khan, author of The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression

As more and more people are mobilizing against war, genocide, poverty, and extraction, Peter Gelderloos' new book is right on time. They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us deftly identifies common patterns of demobilization, ranging from peace policing to reductive identity politics and repression, using vivid stories from recent uprisings and historical struggles to illustrate the dynamics. Gelderloos' decades of participating in and studying resistance movements grounds this book's practical analysis of common misunderstandings cultivated by liberals to stifle resistance efforts. This book shows the costs—to our boldness, our effectiveness, our solidarity, our survival—of forgetting lessons learned in our struggles. Gelderloos shares dozens of stories, often in the words of those who were on the ground, that demonstrate tactics and approaches for getting out of some of the tangles that are holding us back right now. They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us is a much needed tool for the difficult times we are in and the worse ones that are coming.

Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid

1. The superiority of decentralized networks over centralized “command and control” systems is recognized in fields from computer science and AI to animal behavior to ecology… it seems the only fields that claim, without evidence, that centralization is more effective are those that have arbitrarily chosen the State as a necessary protagonist, like political science and the dominant branches of historiography.