From Protection to Power
Towards Revolutionary Becoming
Morning Comrades.
Before we start, I accidentally sent out Wednesday’s dispatch on Sunday. It is what it is, serves me right to get on my laptop when I am tired and that’s just that. I’ll figure out something else to write come Wednesday, it’s not like there is a lack of topics to get through.
Across the so-called liberal democracies of the West, the violence of the state has become more visible, more shameless, and more systemic. Police are no longer mere enforcers of law but open agents of political intimidation and social control. Protesters are beaten, organisers surveilled, unhoused people brutalised, and migrant families caged. What is advertised as “democracy” reveals itself to be a sophisticated theatre of control, wherein elections are permitted but resistance is not. In this context, affinity group, small, autonomous collectives bound by trust and shared values are essential tools of defence, mutual care, and counterattack.
Especially, in the case of the U.S., where just a few days ago the Trump administration is mulling end to habeas corpus, the legal right to challenge one’s detention, people are getting snatched off the streets by ICE agents but also across the rest of the self-proclaimed Western world, it is beyond time to get dead serious about it all. I remeber going to affinity groups meetings as far back as 94, that got serious after 99 and then writing a number of pieces that made their way from zines into the online world around 2008, essentially recalling the essentials of what is to follow below. Back when Trump came to power in 2016 I published a number of even more detailed pieces that deal with the below, but I figured it was nigh on time to summarise them all and offer an updated version what needs to be done and now.
How to Start an Affinity Group (A Practical Guide)
1. Start With Who You Trust
Gather 3 to 10 people you already know and trust—or begin with one or two people and slowly expand.
Trust isn’t just about liking someone. It’s about knowing they won’t fold under pressure, betray a plan, or seek power over the group.
2. Define Your Group’s Purpose
Are you focused on protest defence? Jail support? Street medic work? Food distribution? Surveillance disruption? A combination?
Your purpose should guide your training, materials, and strategy.
3. Establish Communication Protocols
Use encrypted apps like Signal if you have to. But do remember, that any and all communication that is done electronically can and will be tracked, traced and monitored. None of them are safe and should be avoided as best as possible.
Set clear rules: What’s okay to say online? What’s never okay to say in writing?
Create code words or hand signals for high-risk actions.
4. Train Together
Practice de-escalation, first aid, street tactics, and legal observation.
Run scenarios. Role-play. Drill. The police train every day—so should you.
5. Know Your Rights (and Risks)
Learn your local laws on protests, masks, self-defence, and arrest procedures.
Develop a legal support plan: Write emergency contacts on your body, memorise your group’s jail support number.
6. Build Mutual Aid Into Your Core
An affinity group isn’t just for protests—it’s for crisis, burnout, sickness, evictions, surveillance.
Create systems to check in on each other, cook for each other, and show up when the state disappears you.
7. Stay Fluid, Stay Anonymous, Stay Active
Never use real names in action planning.
Rotate roles to avoid burnout and patterns.
Blend in when needed; disappear when targeted; reappear when least expected.
Beyond Defence — Affinity as Prefigurative Power
At first glance, affinity groups look like defensive units: clusters of people preparing to resist arrest, shield a march, or deliver first aid after the cops charge in. And that’s true. But that’s not all they are.
Affinity groups are not just ways to endure violence. They are ways to exit its logic. This is what makes them more than a tactic: they are a different way of being political.
Most systems of power, especially liberal democracies teach us to appeal upward: to vote, to petition, to ask for change from those in charge. Affinity groups do something else entirely. They reject upward appeal and instead build power laterally, among equals. This isn’t just more efficient, it’s more revolutionary. Why? Because it prefigures a new kind of society. That’s a term worth remembering: prefigurative politics means building the world you want, in the shell of the world you have. If you want a future without coercion or exploitation, then your actions today should reflect that, not contradict it.
Affinity groups are microcosms of that possible world.
This is what makes affinity groups revolutionary even when they’re not “fighting.” Their very existence is a confrontation with capitalism’s moral framework, a system that teaches you to compete, isolate, and survive at the expense of others. The state is not neutral in the face of affinity. It sees autonomous care as rebellion. That’s why mutual aid networks are surveilled. That’s why protest medics are targeted. That’s why state power always tries to individualise responsibility and criminalise collectivity.
The Philosophy of Counter-Power
To understand why affinity groups matter, we have to ask the deeper question: What is power? In the liberal worldview, power is seen as something you hold, a vote, a title, a rank. You win it by following the rules. You exercise it by controlling others. But radical traditions, from anarchism to revolutionary socialism see it differently. Power is not a possession. It’s a relationship. And all relationships exist within structures. In capitalism, that structure is built around domination: bosses over workers, landlords over tenants, cops over neighbourhoods, men over women, whiteness over everything else.
That structure is enforced by the state.
Now, the state doesn’t just use repression (cops, prisons, borders). It also uses legitimacy. It teaches you to believe in its justice, trust in its courts, fear its enemies, and internalise its morality. That’s where the real control lies, not just in what the state does to your body, but in what it convinces you to believe about yourself.
Here’s where affinity groups flip the table.
Affinity groups are not seeking state power. They are not waiting for elections, or seeking seats, or asking permission. They are building what philosopher John Holloway calls “power-to,” not “power-over” or the capacity to do things together without domination. When you organise with others in an affinity group, you begin to experience a form of power that is cooperative, not competitive. You make decisions through consensus. You practice accountability without punishment. You build safety through solidarity, not surveillance. These are revolutionary practices, not because they’re perfect, but because they are incompatible with the state’s form of life.
Frantz Fanon said that the most radical act is not simply to resist the oppressor, but to become someone who no longer needs him. That’s what counter-power means: not just opposing the existing order, but becoming ungovernable by it.
A Note on Violence and Affinity
Some will say: “But don’t affinity groups use violence too?”
The answer is complex. What we call “violence” must be understood in context. The state’s violence, policing, incarceration, evictions, war is structural and continuous. It is what Walter Benjamin called “mythic violence”, violence that preserves the law by enforcing fear. By contrast, revolutionary violence, when it appears, is often what Benjamin called “divine violence”, not to uphold law, but to abolish it. The point isn’t chaos. The point is rupture. Affinity groups may engage in property destruction, sabotage, or physical defence. These acts are not ends in themselves. They are tactics in the service of liberation. The difference is clear: the state’s violence maintains power. Affinity-based resistance challenges its right to exist.
From Mutual Aid to Revolutionary Becoming
The task is not merely to survive fascist violence, but to destroy the conditions that make it inevitable. Affinity groups are not a silver bullet. But they are a start. They are how ordinary people, who will never be in history books, you, me, create the conditions for something better. If you’re waiting for someone more qualified, braver, or more radical to lead the way: stop. They are waiting for you, too. Begin with a text, a conversation, a meeting. Then protect. Then defend. Then build.
And when they come for you, as they eventually will: do not stand alone.
The beginning is here.
Yours, warmly,
V.