They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us by Peter Gelderloos weaves history, vignettes, interviews and personal reflections to show how our movements suffer from an inability to pass on lessons learned from one generation to the next. In this blog Gelderloos confronts the amnesia that pervades social movements, arguing that a failure to remember undermines our ability to resist effectively. Reflecting on radical actions of the past, he urges movements to reclaim the power to create lasting, transformative change.
If our movements never forgot, we would have had a global revolution already.
Not the sort of revolution where those in charge just design a new kind of prison, and not the sort where a party replaces the old aristocrats. We would have had a couple of those, and then we would have learned.
If our movements never forgot, we would value healers, gardeners, and storytellers at least as much as fighters. If our movements never forgot, we wouldn’t believe in heroes, nor divide society into angels and devils. If our movements never forgot, we would have learned patience.
If our movements never forgot, no one would be able to say “let’s trust the State to carry out this transformation” without getting laughed off the stage, or getting a stern history lesson from someone who suffered and survived that mistake the last time around.
If our movements never forgot, we would welcome young people and cherish elders, we would teach our shared history and tell our own stories and talk about futures like they are plural, loquacious and as attentive as clay in a child’s eager hands.
If our movements never forgot, we wouldn’t dialogue with cops or sit down with politicians or put our hopes in a referendum or election. We would believe in ourselves. If our movements never forgot, we would know that we will let each other down, we will make mistakes, we will fail. We would also know we have a great capacity for learning, for growing, for getting back up. If our movements never forgot, we would remember more ways of being, and we would be better at imagining even wilder possibilities.
If our movements never forgot, we would remember the commons, we would remember self-organization, we would remember spiritualities of solidarity, and we would remember what they did to sever us from the land, to sever us from our own bodies, to turn some of us into soldiers of patriarchy and mercenaries of white supremacy and we would see paths—not to turn back the clock, but to begin to restore what has been mangled—to trust ourselves again.
If our movements never forgot, we would remember that abolition already happened and it went awry, decolonization already happened and it went awry. We might have some useful theories about the how and the why.
It hurts reading the letters of revolutionaries a century ago, hearing how broken and exhausted they feel after decades of struggle, and recognizing some of the same patterns today. Twenty-five years ago, no one believed we might become this powerful (as I write that I remember it’s not true: the forgotten old-timers who made it happen in the ‘60s and ‘70s knew). No one believed we would be able to take over entire cities, topple powerful governments, block capitalist mega-projects, or set up assemblies and mutual aid networks to reclaim our neighborhoods and keep ourselves safe amidst the disasters governments were incapable of addressing. But we did those things, we felt the collective power of solidarity and direct action. And then, after the crest, came the inevitable lull. If we knew our history, we would have been ready for it: revolutions never move in straight lines. When we grow and push the State back, the State changes strategies, either making a qualitative leap to intensify the repression (as in Egypt, Hong Kong, Turkey, Mexico), or turning down the temperature and introducing the softer techniques of recuperation (as in the US, Greece, Chile), or some mix of the two (as in Britain and Brazil).
Our history wouldn’t give us a manual with all the answers, but it would prepare us with an expectation to pivot, to use organizational structures to meet different needs, to emphasize other kinds of action and relationship-building. Instead, trapped in a state of perpetual collective amnesia, we mimic capitalism by expecting a revolution to come about through a continuous, linear expansion. When that inevitably fails to occur, we turn our backs on our own history, on the battles we fought personally, and we renounce our strengths as well as the strategic questions that would have illuminated our shortcomings. We opt for some easy solution that’s been discredited countless times in the past, whether it’s turning back to reformism or another authoritarian party that gives people the false comfort of ready-made answers.
It hurts seeing young people take to the streets in solidarity with Palestine, but with no awareness of the lessons that were learned (again) in the anti-police and antiracist rebellions of the prior decade, rebellions that were shattering normality as recently as 4 years ago. It hurts seeing authoritarian groups that have only ever showed up as parasites or—at best—organizers of large, disempowering, passive rallies, moving to the front again, trusted again, followed again. It’s jarring to hear the megaphones directing an obedient crowd, 15 years after Black anarchists snatched the megaphone away from the would-be leaders after the police murder of Oscar Grant, reminding people that they had their own voice and they could choose their own targets.
It hurts seeing the materialists erase all the rebellions—some small, strategic, and intentional, others full on insurrections—that occurred before the recession of 2007-2008, just to rescue a dogma that is propped up by ego rather than data or a real desire to empower our struggles.
It hurts imagining the future radicals who will learn that the toppling of Edward Colston or the torching of the Third Precinct police station were outlying events in a peaceful movement that “spread awareness” and “led to important reforms,” much the same way that people of my generation were taught that the antiracist and anticolonial movements of the ‘60s were strictly nonviolent affairs.
It hurts seeing older friends and comrades who have been through hell and back, through prison and clandestinity, through dictatorship or the alienation of being hunted by a democracy, who lost so many of their own friends and comrades… it hurts seeing them not taken care of, neglected, most of their memories and experiences forgotten by the wider struggle.
That’s why I wrote this book: because we need movements that remember.
Peter Gelderloos is a writer and social movement participant. He is the author of They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements, The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, How Nonviolence Protects the State, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Non-Violence, and Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation. His books have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Greek and Serbo-Croat.