The First Decade of Agency, an Anarchist PR Project
Just over a decade ago, a small group of anarchist media activists started what they defined as an anarchist PR project—Agency was officially launched. As we develop a vision and plans for the next decade, we want to share how Agency came to be, how it has evolved, what we have accomplished, and how we hope to spread anarchist ideas and practices into the future.
The seeds of Agency were planted in 2012, when a few of us helped organize a public and widely-viewed debate between CrimethInc. and journalist-activist Chris Hedges about the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and specifically perspectives on violence and property destruction in contemporary social movements. Agency emerged from our recognition of the need to facilitate a better understanding of anarchist ideals among the general public.
We spent 2013 building the collective; the following year, Agency was officially launched when our website premiered. Agency was founded on the heels of social movements like Occupy, but the project was also inspired by anarchist practices honed during the Global Justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which included new decentralized forms of media like the global Independent Media Center network, and high profile direct action campaigns and mass mobilizations that garnered regular international media attention on anarchist organizing.
Agency took lessons learned from these and other projects, along with our own analysis of the weaknesses and strengths of mainstream media coverage of anarchist theories and practices, to build a resource that offers a better understanding of anarchism and ties it into interconnected issues including war, racism, heterosexism, economic and social injustice, and the rise of neofascism. By inserting anarchist ideas into timely mainstream political discourse through commentaries, a newswire, and other content, Agency seeks to help fellow anarchist organizers and groups make often unheard and misrepresented anarchist perspectives better understood.
Check out our Agency Chronology for articles, interviews, press releases, and other content we’ve created in a readily available archive of 10+ years of anarchist commentary and responses to timely issues.
Black Liberation and Anti-Fascism Shape the Trajectory of Agency
Anarchist movements are often inclined toward fresh and urgent thinking. But ten years ago, the landscape of social movement organizing was lacking new public-facing anarchist projects. Agency was founded at a time of racial upheaval in the US, punctuated by the killings of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Eric Garner that helped, however tragically, to propel the Black Lives Matter movement. Black liberation, along with police and prison abolition, became a left political centerpiece in the last decade, and a focus of the struggles around which countless anarchists have organized.
Meanwhile, new Indigenous sovereignty struggles were also taking shape. We saw the labor movement initiate innovative organizing tactics that won substantial victories for the working class. Expert reports warned of the next extinction event: record-breaking heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods compelled organizing on a massive and international scale to fight the fossil fuel industry and other contributors to the climate crisis. Entrenched neoliberalism, a seemingly ever-expanding wealth gap, and a housing market that is increasingly out of reach for many Americans also prompted widespread resistance. And the countervailing rise of a new fascism compelled anarchists to refocus on the antifascist struggle that has been part of our DNA for the better part of the last century. In 2020, the US Department of Justice invented a new term, “anarchist jurisdiction,” as a propaganda tool and a means to repress left and radical activists. All of these developments created new challenges but also opened up fresh opportunities for anarchist education and organizing.
We were also seeing dramatic changes in the media itself. An explosion of workplace organizing by journalists has coincided with the industry’s shift away from print and a corresponding dramatic loss of jobs at outlets across the country. Paradoxically, more anarchists have managed to find a voice for themselves within the corporate media or with innovative online outlets over the past decade. And while the rise of corporate social media has often been followed by its co-optation, social media has also created new opportunities for movements seeking to broadcast liberatory narratives.
Agency Amplifies Anarchists in the News and Anarchist Voices
Agency exists in part to study and expose how anarchist movements are covered by corporate news providers so that, as anarchists, we can make better informed choices as to how or whether we want to interact with them. Ever since our website launched, it has been a crucial resource for anarchist theory and practice. Anarchists in the News provides a constantly updated collection of mainstream media articles in which anarchism and anarchists appear. Critical Voices is Agency’s platform for amplifying anarchist commentary on current events originally published elsewhere. These pieces call attention to issues of direct concern to anarchists and contribute to a radical examination of power relations, the state, and capitalism. We also issue press briefs that clarify the anarchist perspective on issues and events that reporters and editors don’t typically regard as having one, such as the spread of the Ebola virus.
News never sleeps, the saying goes, and neither should the anarchist response. Agency Newswire traces both mainstream and alternative media, highlighting pivotal political struggles and social movements over the years, including: resistance to state power in places like Greece, Hong Kong, Rojava, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and Palestine; Black Lives Matter and the 2020 uprisings across the US, sparked by the police murder of George Floyd; the rise of antifascism and militant responses to white supremacist organizing in Charlottesville, at the Trump inauguration, and in the targeting of anarchists and antifa during the Trump presidency; mobilizations to stop fossil fuel-based projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, Keystone XL, and Line 3; the Stop Cop City movement at the intersection of radical environmentalism and police abolition; the resurgence of mutual aid networks, especially in addressing the tragic impacts of COVID-19 and the climate crisis; and the hardline responses to attacks on abortion access, like Jane’s Revenge.
Through our original commentary pieces, Agency has aimed to bring a vital anarchist perspective to the discourse around urgent issues that need an anti-state, anti-capitalist analysis but seldom get one. Some of these articles are generated by Agency members, others are solicited and written by other anarchist writers, activists, and journalists. Topics and themes we’ve covered over the years include: an anarchist response to Ebola; the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; sexual assaults on campus; antifa and the rise of fascism; anarchist perspectives on J20, both in anticipation and in the aftermath of the Trump inauguration; Emma Goldman’s 150th birthday and her continuing influence; the tradition of May Day protests; mutual aid, from an Indigenous anarchist perspective, and dispatches from the front lines; mass surveillance; and social media censorship.
Changing the Public’s Response to Media
Agency also issues press releases on timely and relevant events in the anarchist movement itself. Some of our most recent have focused on the untimely death in 2023 of our comrade Jen Angel, an Agency co-founder, long-time anarchist, and media activist, and her enduring legacy of fighting for transformative justice.Our newsletters are another way we keep readers and followers updated on our work. You can sign up to receive our newsletter, and view an archive here.
Agency doesn’t just follow and comment on the news, however. We work to change how the public absorbs and responds to the media. In 2019 and 2020, we conducted a series of interviews with radical and anarchist-identified journalists, highlighting their work and sharing their insights. This Agency series, which included interviews with Dan Arel, Shane Burley, Natasha Lennard, and Abby Martin, addressed what it’s like being an explicitly left journalist, issues they’ve faced working in the corporate media, the importance of non-mainstream, left publications, and why engaging with media is important to the advancement of anarchist ideas.
In 2021, we began to explore the visual medium as a way to broadcast anarchist ideas when we partnered with AK Press to produce “What is the State?” an animated video primer based on Eric Laursen’s book, “The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State.” The following year, we launched Finding Agency, a livestream series that kicked off with an interview with Daryle Lamont Jenkins, examining his campaign to expose the new racist neofascism.
We’re dedicated to helping make media activism and anarchist interventions with public discourse a widespread, grassroots practice. In 2023, Agency launched a media grants program for radical writers, artists, and creators in collaboration with the Institute for Anarchist Studies which, following the tragic loss of Agency co-founder Jen Angel, became the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant to honor her legacy. The program helps fuel the types of projects that Jen created throughout her life: projects that make anarchist ideas accessible and reflect the spirit of do-it-yourself action. The core tenets of anarchism that underscored Jen’s life and work—autonomy, mutual aid, voluntary association, direct action—are all amplified by the independent media projects we fund through our anarchist media grants.
Working with Activists and Organizers to Build Skills to Advance Anarchist Movements
Agency also works directly with left activists and anarchist organizers to help them hone their media and messaging skills. By coaching and training members of the anarchist community to develop effective press releases, talking points, and other content, and by training them in managing relationships with mainstream journalists, we hope to enable the next generation of anarchists to gain greater control of the media narrative.
Most recently, Agency has supported activists in the #StopCopCity movement in developing their media skills to oppose police militarization and preserve the Weelaunee Forest from destruction. Agency has been working to build the media skills of defendants charged with domestic terrorism and RICO (Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), with the aim of seizing media narratives to help fight their charges.
That doesn’t mean we avoid working with mainstream journalists. Agency is instrumental in educating reporters and writers from mainstream, corporate outlets on anarchist issues and connecting them to the best subject matter experts to interview and cover. When an anarchist voice is needed, we make ourselves available to be interviewed for stories in print and online, on podcasts, on TV/video, and through other media formats.
Who is Agency and Where are We Going?
The members of Agency bring a diverse skill set to this work from their different backgrounds and political histories. We are activists, organizers, educators, writers, public relations workers, communications strategists, graphic designers, web designers, documentary filmmakers, and video journalists. Demystifying anarchism, making it visible to a broader public, and clarifying inaccuracies consistently perpetuated in the mainstream media are the common goals that bring all of us together.
The devastating loss of our comrade Jen Angel brings a sad close to our first decade, but it has also enabled us to share her legacy and build a grant program in her name, as a way to support cutting-edge and DIY media projects similar to those that played such a big role in her life and work. The opportunity to bring Jen’s legacy into the future has inspired us to continue our commitment to making anarchism more visible and powerful. By furthering our collaborations with fellow anarchists, troublemakers, and radical journalists, we strive to find new ways to support the fight against capitalism and the state and promote alternative visions of a more just world through media work and development of resources within our community to do so.
We’ll see you in the streets and in the headlines!
Check out our Agency Chronology for articles, interviews, press releases, and other content we’ve created in a readily available archive of 10+ years of anarchist commentary and responses to timely issues.
