Note: If you're not familiar with anarchism (as an ideology, not just "chaos" or "the concept of not having a government"), the viewpoint in this post probably won't make much sense. I recommend To Change Everything, an anarchist appeal by CrimethInc (PDF) or Ungovernability by Tom Nomad (PDF) as good introductions to the subject.
This is a much shorter blog post than my last one, but I wanted to capture an idea that I had the other night. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of cavitation, it describes a phenomenon in fluid dynamics that can damage mechanisms like propellers and pumps. If you think about a propeller spinning underwater, it pushes a ship forward by creating high pressure on one side and low pressure on the other. But if the pressure gets low enough (say, if the propeller is spinning incredibly quickly), the water will boil into bubbles of water vapor before it can rush in to counteract the low pressure. When those bubbles collapse, it produces a shock wave that can damage the mechanism. While thinking about the Columbia encampments last night, I thought of an analogy comparing those encampments to cavitation bubbles: tiny voids in the usual pressure of "law and order," voids which are violently collapsed from the outside. I wanted to draw out that metaphor a little bit in this post, as a way of highlighting how seemingly inconsequential moments of resistance against policing can slowly do damage to the vast structures of control that are otherwise immovable through our day-to-day actions, and how that damage comes through the state's own hand.
Last night, I was watching The Encampments, the documentary about the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University and other pro-Palestine encampments that sprung up at universities around the same time. Watching the footage in the film, I saw a bubble of peaceful solidarity. Students in the encampment were playing instruments, distributing food, painting, singing, dancing, and collectively making critical decisions. It was only where the encampments brushed up against the world outside that violence was able to sustain itself, and ultimately the encampments were suppressed through gratuitous use of state violence. It felt similar to descriptions I've heard of CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone formed in 2020 in Seattle, which managed to survive several weeks before being shut down by police. Amid the usual, constant pressure from the systems of control around us, these little bubbles offer a short-lasting glimpse of a world where they are absent.
But when the cavitation bubble collapses, things do not return to precisely how they were before. After the ping of the shockwave against steel, a tiny pit is left behind, and over time, that pitting can destroy even the strongest materials. The beauty is that it isn't the vacuum left behind by the absence of water that does the damage, it's the water itself, violently surging in to crush the bubble of vapor. When the police brutalize college students to destroy a peaceful encampment, or when fascist non-state actors drive a car or fire a bullet into an autonomous anarchist zone, they themselves are doing damage to the surfaces our society acts upon. For many people, the legitimacy of policing itself is called into question when video emerges of a non-violent 19 year old in a scarf being shoved to the ground, or shot with rubber bullets, or sprayed with chemical agents. The overwhelming disparity in use of violence between the pro-human-rights crowd (whether they're anarchists, communists, social democrats, or somewhere else on the spectrum of progressivism) and the anti-human-rights crowd (whether they're police, far-right militants, university administrators, or some other form of opponent to the progressive/socialist/anarchist cause) speaks for itself, gradually destroying the legitimacy of the state in all of its forms.
It will become harder before it gets easier. With every pocket of ungovernability, every cavitation void, comes a stronger and better-equipped adversary. The 2024 occupation of Hind's (Hamilton) Hall looked much different from the 1968 occupation (where it became Malcolm X Liberation College). The state, and universities (as tiny models of the state), have access to new technologies, have developed new tactics, and have received new forms of authorization and legitimacy. But as slowly as it is happening, the tide is turning against states. Just through the issue of Israel and Palestine alone, hairy questions about the legitimacy of states and concept of the nation-state have been raised to a broad audience, and that broad audience is coming around to the answers that anarchists and other revolutionaries have known all along. Party communism may be on the rise again, but a three-arrows sort of politics has become mainstream among those progressive of the Democratic Party. The pipeline from democratic socialist to anarchist is short, far shorter than the one from democratic socialist to Marxist-Leninist. It's too early to take anything close to a victory lap, but it may be the case that in fascism's dying gasp, we are seeing a renaissance, one which will bring us closer than ever before to a fatal crack in the facade of the state.