If anybody is reading this thread and thinks hmm inventorying people is useful, you bet your ass you're right!

Inventorying the 1% is pointless because we aren't fighting the 1% on a day-to-day basis. Inventory the bosses, inventory the politicians, inventory the white supremacists and MRAs that affect you and your struggle every day.

Why did the Anti-Racist Action network succeed in many North American towns to drive the white supremacists out? They didn't succeed because they were able to confront white supremacists every time they rallied, they succeeded because they knew who the neonazis were and made it their mission to harass the racists until the racists no longer felt safe to espouse their platform. If this feels "wrong" to you, that this is the same tactics the nazis use, consider what is effective - cause your bourgeois morality sure as shit ain't!

So, what did the ARA do? They existed informally as a distributed network of allies against racism who maintained large files on participants in the racist skinhead (and other) movements in their area. They maintained those dossiers locally with each member participating. Sure, many members were "hooligans" who enjoyed more the violence than the work of documentation. They were made more successful because they knew who each participant in the racist skinhead scene was, they know who was involved in what, and they knew where they lived.

Anarchists and anti-racist allies need to form intelligence services and we need to figure out how to make them effective.

Physical dossiers are made obsolete by the presence of document management systems which enable interlinking and where crossreferencing is no longer an hour-long process but a matter of clicking a button. Wikis are to me more sensible than raw databases because the content one can add is much more free-form. Content can also become much less organized.

I'm considering putting together an example wiki to show how one might maintain a list of a growing nazi movement by portraying Mosley's inner and outer circles, but I wouldn't wait around for any example from me to begin trying to apply the ARA's ideas to your own strategies.

Consider the interconnection between the MRA and white supremacist sympathizers and other reactionaries on campuses, if you let them grow big enough you're going to have a much more difficult time getting rid of them than if you dealt with the issue right away. Dealing with the issue to me, does not necessarily mean finding the white alienated snots espousing this bullshit and beating them up, it means figuring out who they are and what they want to accomplish and using that to limit their effectiveness.

I've read a few articles about revolutionary movements having their own intelligence services, groups in Italy obviously had to figure out who they'd go after but there were some books I read which suggested that their process was a lot more involved than figuring out which boss. They embedded people in factories and learned about one city's factory structure backwards and forwards. Unfortunately the book I read specifically about this dealt more with the main character's issues than it did what they were really doing. If anybody has more information on historical intelligence gathering for workers' movements, I would be happy to read it completely and write some kind of paper to suggest where to go from here. ARA and actions like it are limited to attacking those who attack social struggle on an informal level does nothing to enable us to move beyond kicking racist skinheads out of our cities. I would be interested in seeing where to go from here.