In Defense of (a slightly more modest) Marxism

      Continuing my process of reprinting older material, this is the first piece of writing that I had published in the Arise! Journal.  It was  a letter critiquing a Marxist-Leninist polemic published in the journal.  Looking back on it, Ellen Messer-Davidow's classes on Foucault and Marxism played a strong influence on my thinking at the time, along with my strong left communist inclinations.  I thought it would be worth putting up to complete the full set of Arise! writings.

          I read Michael Wood's commentary on Marxism-Leninism with a great deal of distress.  Once again we were presented with a totalizing, almost religious rendering, of Marxism with the tripartite image of the Marx/Engels/Lenin godhead (father, son, Holy Ghost anyone?)  This vision of Marxism has already died (and good riddance to it) as a meaningful political force with the fall of the eastern bloc in 1989.  Whatever benefits they gave their subjects in the form of welfare cannot make up for the totalitarian and undemocratic nature of the regimes.  Instead of trying to liberate the masses from the yoke of capital, they merely tried to perfect its practices under one state and party.  Utterances such as Wood's are similar to the digestive systems of a corpse that continues its process even after death for a period of time.

            This does not mean the philosophy of praxis or the process of thought beginning with Marx should be abandoned.  But the ideas discussed above must be jettisoned.  The first thing that must be rejected is the claim that Marxism is a science valorized above other modes of thinking simply due to such a claim.  Marxism is a set of incredibly valuable critical tools, but it would be arrogant to say that it doesn't have valuable things to learn from other forms of thinking such as feminism or Foucauldian notions of discourse.

            Along with that the very notion of an authoritative or orthodox Marxism must be rejected.  There are many different marxisms traveling on many different trajectories.  It's significantly different for Louis Althusser, Rosa Luxemburg, Frederic Jameson, etc.  Each of these individuals was or is responding to distinctly different formations of capitalist domination within different time periods.  Andreu Nin of POUM stated that the map of Russia could not be laid upon Spain.  Similarly, no particular approach of Marxism can be meaningful to everyplace at the same time uniformly.  There must be translation of ideas across cultural borders.  Good examples of this can be seen in the POUM of republican Spain, the FSLN in Nicaragua, and the IRA in Ireland.  One should go even further by saying that no form of Marxian thinking should be privileged over others within a single location.

            The third and last thing that must be rejected is the notion of the vanguardist party.  I think it's interesting that Michael Wood left out this important part of the beginning of the manifesto. "The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties.  They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.  They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement."  I think that Marx's more radical and democratic vision contained within these statements should be embraced over the stifling and undemocratic vision of Lenin's dictatorship over the proletariat in the form of an avant-garde intellectual leadership.  We should be in solidarity with the multitude, and work with them towards our mutual liberation.

            Rather than building our visions of radicalism on unreconstructed, nostalgic visions of cold war dichotomies, we should instead reach into the future and build anew. No matter how tentative the process is and how many mistakes we make on the way there,  those acts will be incalculably more valuable than the wise practices dictated to us by the cleverest central committee.

Polemics and Discussion: A Sort of Response to Michael Wood

This is the first of the articles that I wrote for the Arise! Journal.  It was written in response to a polemic written by an unrelated former anarchist, turned Marxist-Leninist.  The influence of Foucault is obvious, and folks who have read some of the other material on the blog will probably recognize continued themes and concepts.  There has been a thread in my writing that has been focused in conceptualizing a radical form of pluralism.  I'm not sure if that has been successful or not, but it's been a constant issue.  To be honest, there are some formal issues with the article.  Most notably, I probably wouldn't have brought in so much of Foucault's text, or at least offer more context for the material.  In any case, here is the article.

At the beginning of Michael’s article he states that he was initially interested in the issue of what he calls “left sectarianism” before he decided discussing the “role of white activists in anti-racist struggles.”  Michael argues that because of recent events, these issues have become paramount.  No doubt they are.  But I am going to return to his initial question as a form of a response.  It may be that it is only in examining the questions of “left sectarianism” that we can begin to address the questions that Michael seems to be interested in.

            To be completely honest, I am not so much interested in dealing with “left sectarianism” so much as I am interested in dealing with the inevitable response of “anti-sectarianism”.  This call for a form of “anti-sectarian” politics is inevitable for all parties involved, from reformists, to Marxist-Leninists, and often even anarchists.  At the same time, the individual that is acting as the “sectarian” is always the other, whether that is a member of a different Marxist-Leninist sect, or someone who believes in a different philosophy.  This is the question I want to investigate, how does a call for an end of fighting become another weapon within that fighting.

Before we try to explain this phenomenon directly, we need to take a bit of a detour.  There is an interesting interview with Michel Foucault, in which he is asked about his aversion to polemics, and he responds,  “I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them.  It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics.  If I open a book and see the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism,” I shut it again right away.  That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way.  I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the morality that concerns the search for the truth and the relation to the other.”[1]

            In this section of Foucault’s response, two concepts come up, the idea of discussions and the idea of polemics.  This notion of polemics is defined in the following way, “The polemicist… proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance, and will never agree to question.  On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat.  For him, then, the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him, as an interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning.”[2]

            This creates a specific set of political practices.  “Polemics defines alliances, recruits partisans, unites interests or opinions, represents a party; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one must fight until the moment that this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears.”[3] These alliances are implicitly built on a framework that is perceived to be already there.  In effect, this type of alliance is built upon a powerful conception of teleology, and one that does not allow for a great deal of negotiation.  The polemicist is the one who can stand up and say that, “I have the way” and just as significantly, those who question this path need to be crushed.  The fact is that the logical path of polemicist is a politics of control, because after all, they do know better.[4]
 

            Let’s move back to the issue of “anti-sectarianism” and see how it relates to polemics.  Now what does this term “anti-sectarianism” mean?  It’s one that I have heard bandied about quite a bit, primarily within Marxist-Leninist circles.  It has a sort of circular function within the various circles engaged in that type of politic.  Every section looks out and sees a left sectarian in the form of their opponents.

            When the term “anti-sectarianism” comes up, I imagine to men brawling on the streets, I mean really going at, gouging at each others' eyes, kicking, using whatever weapons they can reach for.  At the same time, each man is yelling at the other one, “We must cooperate!  This conflict is futile!  We must put our differences aside to fight the common enemy!”  And yet they continue to fight.

            This may seem like a bizarre, even contradictory situation, until one realizes that the words that the two men are engaging in are just another weapon that have available to them.  They are engaging in polemics.  When Marxist-Leninists scream the same type of slogans, they’re doing the same thing, using a weapon to dominate the others, because the cooperation that they want is in fact no cooperation at all.

            It’s at this point that Michael’s article becomes relevant.  One can argue that the issues are apples and oranges since Michael ostensibly doesn’t deal with the issue of “anti-sectarianism”, but rather the issue of white organizers dealing with issues of people of color.  In making an attempt to examine this issue, Michael creates a narrative of anti-racism.  At the moments of progress, we find a proper Marxist-Leninist analysis occurring, when there are failures, there was a lack of understanding, and frequently a betrayal[5] of this understanding.  So we are faced with an opinion that change can only occur through a specific form of Marxist-Leninist politics.

            In doing this, Michael makes a strong polemical attack against the Communist Party of the United States.  Now an interesting piece could be written about the CPUSA and the ways that it approached race within different periods of its history.  It would be a history of contingencies, a domination of the Soviet Union’s interests over the interests over the interests of the indigenous party, ambitions, alliances, and yes, even betrayals, but we don’t get that from Michael’s narrative.  Instead we are given an easily digestible narrative that presents a polemic of a shining path forward that has been constantly betrayed.

            The frustrating thing is that Michael asks an interesting question, one that is certainly not a new one, but still an interesting dilemma nonetheless.  The simple fact is that activism has had a propensity to follow that same exclusionary logic of the rest of the country, separate and unequal.  The problem is that this dilemma simply cannot be untangled within a polemic.  Michael puts up a question, what is the role of white activists when dealing with issues that touch upon people of color, but it is clear that the focus of his article is in support of a particular form of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

            In fact the issue of white activists working with people of color isn’t really dealt with at all in any substance.  Michael makes a few maneuvers to state that proper activists should act with “principle”, but that’s about all.  Instead, I think that we need to look at this question within what Foucault referred to the “relation to the other.”  

            Audre Lorde makes an extremely cogent comment about this issue, “Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.  As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.  But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.  As a result those differences have been misnamed and misused in the name of separation and confusion.”[6]

            Lorde’s comments present us the problem that Michael’s article never really wants to address.  After all, the attempt to negotiate difference within the framework of equality puts one into rather murky waters.  It’s very possible that in the attempt to do this, he could possibly say something that would take him from his position as the polemicist judge and place him in the position of fallibility like the rest of us.  After all, Lorde is stating rather explicitly that we do not have a way of negotiating difference in front of us, and by implication, it is something that we need to create.  In effect, we must abandon the safety of any teleology, whether that is the shining path forward of Marxist-Leninism or the golden road backwards of primitivism.

            In effect we need to return to Foucault’s second concept to pull us out of this bind.  In his discussion of polemics and discussion, he privileges discussion.  He defines this as a “serious play of questions and answers”, and one in which “the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion.”  He goes on to point out that “the person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given to him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on.  As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of the other.” Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners take pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of the dialogue.”[7]

            This form of communication that Foucault entitles “discussion” is perhaps the way out of the dilemma that Lorde puts in front of us.  It creates a forum for difference to be negotiated in a manner that neither demands assimilation nor destruction of the other.  There is nothing assumed within this relationship.  If a project or telos comes out of it, it will have been created within the logic of the relationship and not beforehand, and more significantly, it will be subject to constant revision within that relationship.

            To return this question to the issue of white activists working with people of color, it seems that the primarily white activist community makes far too many assumptions when it makes contact with communities of color.  These assumptions take a number of forms, ranging from making assumptions on issues and tactics, to making assumptions by not recognizing the complexities and antagonisms that exist within those communities.  Additionally, those activists don't recognize the structures of privilege that there activism is built upon.  It’s not productive to enter into these discussions in a state of abjection, at the same time; neither can we enter under the premise that we have the answers to everything.

            I know that there is nothing contained within that last paragraph that hasn’t been said a hundred thousand times before, and yet, for the most part it is ignored.  The question of why that is true could probably fill a book, but the one thing that I want to return to is the absence of real discussion.  Our primary modes of communication with the other, whether that other is someone who disagrees with us ideologically or simply not an activist, is one of polemics.  We chant at demos, ask choreographed questions at forums, our publications are painfully predictable in content and form, etc.  In short, the responses that we give to questions of difference are really not all that far off from the ones that Audre Lorde describes, we ignore it, and if we can’t do that, we try to assimilate to it if it seems powerful, and destroy it if it seems weak. 

There is nothing simple contained within this model.  It is not just a matter of behaving in a “principled” manner, but changing a whole series of entrenched informal structures in the way that we communicate with each other.  It’s hardly hip or popular right now, but late second wave, and early third wave feminism has given a great deal of thought to the issues of communication and difference, and a return to those discussions and practices might allow for new forms of community to arise.      

---

[1] Foucault, Michel, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations” in Foucault, Michel, Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), 111.

[2] Foucault, Michel, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations”, 112.

[3] ibid., 112.

[4]I would argue that there is an interesting parallel between the concept of polemics that Foucault describes as a “parasite” to discussion in the way that Antonio Negri points out the way that constituted power (potere) acts in relation to constituent power (potenzas).  In fact, I would argue that there is not just an analogy between the two, but a homology.  (See Negri, Antonio, Insurgencies  and Negri, Antonio and Hardt, Michael, Empire)

[5] ironically, by invoking the tradition of “betrayal”, Michael is engaging in the primary mistake that dogmatic Trotskyists make by ignoring structural problems, for individual faults, and villainy

[6] in Sandoval, Chela, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 117.

[7] Foucault, Michel, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations”, 111.

On Security Culture: A Critique

       This another in a line of articles that I wrote for the Arise! journal during the period of the anti-globalization movement.  For those who haven't read the earlier entry, the journal was a periodical tied to the collectively run bookshop.  My interest was to move the newsletter to take a more critical role, to become a space in which activists could critically discuss the practices and ideas of the movement, possibly an untenable goal given the public format of the journal.  This entry was the most discussed and provocative of the essays that I wrote.  It led to a number of conversations, as well as a very angry and incoherent rant on my voice mail.  I've left it largely untouched with the exception of cutting out a footnote on primitivism that I feel is largely polemical and unproductive at this point.

      In addition, this article shouldn't be taken as a critique of security culture, per se.  There are many moments when the techniques developed under that name allow for more productive actions, and the legal ramifications of direct action have only become more drastic since the article has been written.  The article is a critique of the way that those often necessary and productive techniques were used to legitimate micro-structures of exclusion and domination.  I think these are not simply faults that a small group of bad people possess.  Instead, they indicate a set of behaviors that we are all capable of.  In that, it's part of a process of considering the importance of the means of how we engage in activism, a set of practices that invariably shape the ends of what comes out of that organizing and activism.

On Security Culture: A Critique

     Within a number of activist circles, the concept of security culture has become an important one in regulating the behavior of activists. This creates a series of practices that are legitimized on the logic of preventing an external threat from disrupting the efforts of activists to resist the current state of things. There are a number of arguments that examine the question from this angle, asking whether this culture is sufficient in achieving this end, whether the methods of security culture are being used properly, etc. In effect we have a discussion that works within the ideological logic of security culture itself.

     These are interesting questions and in the case certain types of illegal direct action, crucial questions, but I am interested in asking a different set of questions, that is what does the series of practices constituted under the rubric of security culture do to internal relations within activist communities? I will argue that in effect, that security culture acts to produce privileged and unprivileged actors within activist projects. That the privileged actors to some extent constitute an inside, and those who are unprivileged acts as an outside. This process operates by the control of information, those who are trusted and inside are allowed to know more of what is happening than those who are outside. The last premise is that this mode of security culture allows for those inside to have a number of means to punish those on the outside.

      So, how does a series of practices that are designed for a single expressed purpose, to avoid prosecution and infiltration, become, in effect, an informal methodology of sovereignty? Well to understand that, we need to first look at what constitutes an inside and an outside within this logic. In effect, we need to look at the cultural formation that the activist circles that adopt security culture take.

     Within this article, I am interested at looking at security culture within the confines of two overlapping formations. The first formation is a type of anarchist politics that emphasizes spontaneity and illegal direct action politics. The second formation is a type of DiY punk culture. So in effect, the individual who is inside is marked by a number of signs that are based on a manner of dress, age, and political expressions. These signs form a simultaneous dress and speech code that demarcates the individual in question as legitimate.

     This inside is in some ways a far more exclusionary one than within traditional left politics through its very informality. After all, there is no party doctrine or code to critique. Instead we are left with a certain form of cultural and political sameness that constitutes a certain hegemonic formation. And this formation can be seen to have two distinct qualities, 1. It is very young. One rarely finds individuals over the age of 25 at the informal social gatherings of said communities 2. It is primarily white. It is not that there is a de jure exclusion of individuals that fit those patterns; rather it is a more insidious de facto exclusion. What constitutes a ‘militant’ or a ‘radical’ is constituted within very narrow categories.

      It is at this point that security culture steps back in. It acts as a sort of enforcement device of this inside. To point to a rather extreme example of this type of enforcement, a friend of mine was trying to become involved within some of the organizing around Mayday. The trouble was that he was middle-aged, dressed in a manner that made him look not that much different than the average person on the street, and he had a mustache. This immediately gave him the label ‘cop’. Now this individual, who is an anarchist, and had been involved in direct action politics when his accusers were in grade school, simply threw up his hands in disgust and left.

     I would argue that the example that I gave is the phenomenon at its most pathological, but it can be seen in a number of everyday examples that are considerably more naturalized. Instead of looking at any number of activities that I was to some extent outside of, I’ll examine something that I was involved in at a privileged inside position, the formation and the organizational politics of ROAR (Radical Offensive Against Racism). ROAR was formed when a number of individuals (primarily anarchists) wanted to be involved in protesting the Ku Klux Klan/Neo-Nazi rally occurring late in the summer of 2001, but had no interest in the official organization because of the personalities, ideologies, and tactics of its lead organizers. Ironically, when I initially started discussions with others in forming what would become ROAR, my ideas of what the group should become were open and democratic. The moment of the Klan rally should be used as a rallying point to push white radical anti-authoritarian activists into realizing that anti-racist activism had to be built on actual relations with activists of color in the context of concrete political projects. This of course, failed miserably.

     Instead, ROAR became a creature of insiderism and security culture. The meetings were effectively structured within a layered manner. First there were the open public meetings. Obviously these were limited as well, being that one had to go to the locations where they were advertised, street or internet, but anyone could walk off the street and come in. The second layer was the meetings that occurred afterwards over pizza and beers that were primarily designed to discuss tactics of the day itself. These were events that you effectively had to be invited to attend the later meetings. The third layer consisted of a number of small gatherings to come up with details on security or tactics. This layout is a bit schematic and doesn’t capture the nuances that were involved in planning, but it works as an approximate overview.

     This type of layering organizing can be seen frequently at the organizing of these types of anti-authoritarian protests. They in effect act as a sort of informal parody of the Leninist model, moving from the mass meetings of the popular front group to the meetings of the party subaltern to the inner-sanctum of the central committee. The fact that it is organized informally, based on friend networks and cultural markings doesn’t make it any less exclusionary.

     The tactics that were envisioned at those meetings followed the same logic. They were in fact a logic of putschism. The tactics that we theorized were built on a model that showed no confidence with the greater attendees of the demonstration. After all, every outside face is a potential police officer waiting to pop out. In that we came up with increasingly elaborate strategies of stopping the klan rally before it even started. We came up with structures that had no members to them. More significantly, because of our informal closed-door system, we wound up terrifying the hell out of a number of the demonstrators because they only saw the militancy of our propaganda, which emphasized attacking the klan rather than disrupting the event.

     Most depressing was the fact that we neglected the things that were most built upon mass participation. For instance, we had planned a concert for the day before the protest, but only a couple members did the work, and many neighborhoods were not fliered for the event. The discussions around the event only took place at the initial public meetings, and only briefly at that.[1] It would be a mistake to call the show that we had a failure, but it certainly held more potential than was actualized.

     This actually does relate back to the issues of security culture directly. It does because security culture is a logic that emphasizes keeping out the outsider, the “other.” There is a certain logic to it off course when one is about to do something illegal, but the trouble is that is has leaked into a whole range of other activist practices. In this case, it led to less emphasis to what could be a way of bringing people outside of traditional activist communities into the project of anti-racist politics.
     The ironic thing about this whole series of events is that ROAR’s role in the demonstration was fairly successful, but only because of the utter failure of our plans. Instead of playing at guerilla war, we wound up forming an ad hoc group that pushed out klan supporters out of the demonstration, working with a group of Latino punks, old ARA folks, and a kid who terrified the Nazis by speaking to them in German. We, in effect, did what I originally intended to do in the end, but all the hours of planning that we did, were completely wasted.

     What I wanted to capture in my discussion is the way that security culture legitimized and even created a climate of exclusion. Within this context, security culture created something along the lines of a slightly more sophisticated clubhouse, with the sign “keep out” firmly in place. I’ve seen this numerous times within activism. All it has managed to do is alienate people, keep number small, and spawn a whole series of unproductive demonstration and actions. The meeting of ROAR primarily succeeded in creating a closed community, with its own pathologies and hierarchies. This circled wagon approach also lead to attacks on activists who were critical of the project of ROAR, following in the tradition of ARA who also often took a similar, “you’re either with us or against us attitude.”
     I use the example of ROAR precisely because it doesn’t contain any of the excesses that I have heard around security culture. To point to those moments would be to allow security culture off the hook. After all, one could say that security culture within the day to day lives of activism is acceptable, but not under the excessive terms that the moments in the article suggest, but I want to go farther and argue that with few exceptions[2], security culture is far more damaging than it is productive. I think that ultimately security culture has been a hindrance upon us, as that it has kept us limited to a small community. We will need to take considerable risks, with personal issues, with security, etc. in order to expand beyond it.

     But beyond that, perhaps the most dangerous phenomenon connected with security culture is the exteriorriolization of problems. This has had comic effects such as the blaming of undercover police for the failure to raise the tripod at Mayday 2000[3], but it has had much more serious impacts on the practice and organization of the people engaged in security culture. It has allowed for the serious contradictions lying at the heart of our projects to flourish unnoticed and unexamined. We must recognize that ‘the enemy’, the society we so pathologically try to keep out, is already there. We were raised in its schools, families, and other institutions. We must recognize it in ourselves.
     This construction of the other also allows for certain individuals to accumulate the power to control through these mechanisms. For instance, security culture puts a great deal of emphasis on the policing of language, ranging from what is permissible to say to who one can speak to concerning these issues. These rules are frequently manipulated in order for individuals to quiet others, and enforce certain orthodoxies.

     Just as frequently, this mechanism becomes an isolating one, freezing people’s speech concerning controversial and dangerous topics. For example, the disastrous ISAG[4] protest was heavily marred by the use of security culture.[5] There was a lack of communication on the part of tactics; trainings were canceled because of police presence, etc. The result was that the protest was under-prepared and chaotic. Also, the large amount of allies that were sympathetic to the anarchist community, although not a part of it (what the old Leninists referred to as “fellow travelers”) were notably absent as they were in abundance at the Mayday demonstration earlier in the summer. This drastic use of said tactics also didn’t keep 50 undercover police officers from participated in the protest. And afterwards, criticisms of the demonstration were frozen out of discussions within large gatherings, and tended to occur within personal discussion. It took over a year to admit that the demonstration was a complete failure.

     But more significantly, shot through the ISAG protest and beyond, this logic became extraordinarily exclusionary. Protests were organized by small cliques of individuals who left out any outside participation same small, grainy, photocopied fliers that demanded attendance. One could see both ‘security culture’ as control and ‘security culture’ as universal fear could be seen in abundance. It became a way to enforce certain cultural and ideological codes, and a way freezing any criticism of those codes. The height of security culture became perversely, the culture of insecurity.

     There is a certain irony in this critique as that the era of security culture as a cultural dominant has come to an end, but I still think that the critique has value. The more militant tactics taken up between the Seattle WTO protests and their suspension after 9-11 point towards far stronger possibilities than the older, more traditional formations of protest. However, as old assumptions were questioned within that period, new assumptions were created and were often as destructive as the old ones were if not more. The point is that as we return to militancy, we challenge and do not replicate the forms of hierarchy and exclusion that were allowed under the cloak of security culture. The question will our militancy be based on the sprawling potential power seen in Seattle, Washington D.C. and other places, or will it be based on the closed sad militancy of the terrorist cell.


[1] There is another way of approaching this critique that would focus on the overemphasis on confrontational politics on the part of contemporary anarchist politics, but that will have to wait. There is also a critique that can be made concerning the neglect that activists often make concerning more boring and prosaic activities that nonetheless are essential, this will also wait.

[2] Those exceptions dealing with illegal direct action sabotage, I should note that, overall, my experience with the use of security culture tactics at large demos has been one of failure.

[3] For those not at the event, a number of activists tried put up a tripod in the middle of an intersection during the Mayday march of 2000. The attempt failed because neither the blac bloc nor the rest of the protesters were warned about the raising of said tripod. Typically, at the time, this was blamed on shady characters instead.

[4] The International Society of Animal Genetics held its conference within the Twin Cities in the late-summer/early autumn of 2000. Direct action street protests were organized in response. The expected national turnout didn’t pan out, and there were very few demonstrators, perhaps 150. The disaster around this protest lead to the freezing of the militant spirit that had came out of the Mayday demonstration.

[5] I should note that there was very little chance of ISAG being a successful protest. Some 600 police officers were at the demonstration, dressed in full riot gear, armed with batons, tear gas, beanbag guns, and pepper spray. However, I will still argue that if the preparations were more open, the event could have attracted more people, and simply could have been less disastrous.

My Favourite Buildings (and me)

     The Bedlam Theatre recently had it's last romp a few days ago.  I'm not sure how they lost the building, but I had heard some rumors that the building was going to be taken down to be turned into a parking lot.  I agree with Niels Strandskov that the value of the institution goes beyond the simple existence of a building, but I have to confess that I will miss that building.  Compared to the rather squalid first building of the organization, the replacement was a much more inviting theatrical space.  (Let's be honest, the simple existence of multiple working bathrooms accomplished this.)  With the inclusion of the bar and restaurant, upstairs space, and porch, the space could almost be called eloquent.  You could look out at the Downtown skyline from the porch/deck area, which was a spectacular view.

     My involvement with Bedlam has always been quite limited even as a customer, but the closing of the building reminded me of the loss of other radical institutions in the Twin Cities.  Most recently, we lost the North Country co-op and the Arise! bookstore collective, but if we move farther into the history of the cities, the list gets longer.  I can come up with several off the top of my head, The New Riverside Cafe, The Emma Center, and any number of non-profit musical venues.  I suspect that you could probably expand that list considerably by talking to an older veteran of the activist community such as Mike Whalen.  I'd like to say that these institutions 'haunt' the terrain of the cities, but all too often, they simply disappear.  The people involved in those projects remember them, but their memory is erased from the reproduction of the community.  As  a simple example, I doubt many new anarchists even know that the Emma Center existed, let alone know of its politics, contradictions, and problems.

     I would like to see more records of this history.  There was an interesting project dealing with the West Bank counter-culture in the 1960's and 1970's that came out recently.  Why not produce something similar dealing with radical institutions?  I would really love to read something on the history of the North Country Co-op, and perhaps something on Arise! that moved beyond Mike's issues with the half.com issue.  The need for this material goes beyond simple nostalgia.  I think that there is a lot we can learn from in the often abject failures that occurred in these institutions.  There is some material dealing with the Co-op Wars, and the political and personal conflicts that arose out of that period.  But I never saw the kind of critical engagement with the material in a way that would reflect on our practices, our capacity for violence, and our ability to produce personality cults.  Within that spirit, I would love to see some discussion on the relationship of the primarily white Emma Center and its neighbors of color, and at some point, the big fights in the Arise! Collective.  Perhaps at some point, we can break out of the simple nostalgia/polemic binary.

     But beyond that, I also want to recognize my simple desire for the institutions that shaped me to have some sort of formal record.  The Emma Center was the first political project that I was involved in.  It pushed me out of a white, suburban shell of a world in a larger, more vibrant, political world, which has demanded that I confront the assumptions that I built in that shell.  I can still remember sitting and listening to the sophisticated conversations between Shawn DeCentral, Jeff Subhumyn, and Max Sparber that were just out of my reach.  We would share black bean hummus and bagels that we bought from the little co-op across the street, and I gradually was introduced into the conflicts and polemics of the anarchist sub-culture.  I also had to deal with a set of conflicts and polemics that were completely alien to me.  The split between The Emma Center and Profane Existence had a lot to do with my exodus from the punk sub-culture that had brought me to the collective, for instance.  But I couldn't have explained to you the differences between the Blast and Emma Center, or the complex debates around the Love and Rage federation.

     Not all of my memories fell into that political terrain, though.  My favorite memory of the place was Shawn's effort to paint the floor.  The Emma Center had a truly disgusting and dingy wood floor, and Shawn had decided to paint it.  He got some blue paint one night, and went to work.  However, at the end of the job he had literally painted him into a corner.  I think he had to paint himself out of the building.  (The floor actually looked pretty good after that effort.)  Those small tasks often were often significant to me.  For instance, I remember fixing a light with Shawn at one point, learning how to deal with neighborhood kids, and the politics of the center's daycare project.  Finally, for all the conflict and mean-spiritedness between members (and it was pretty awful at times), I really remember the patience that people had for my bullshit, and the willingness to offer informal mentoring (I really credit this mostly to Shawn, but I think that I had a positive experience with everyone at the collective.)

     In any case, I think that I have taken the sentimentality wagon about as far as I am going to take it.  I'm supposed to be critically analyzing melodrama, not reproducing it.  It's also worth mentioning that the Arise! project is going to be taking a new form with Boneshaker Books and I'm sure that we're going to see a version of Bedlam that will put the old building to shame (although, I suspect nothing will surpass that view.)  To conclude, my interest in these radical institutions ties into a larger interest in historical memory.  I always thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of historical archaeology of the Twin Cities area, that would allow for an exploration of the many layers of history in the area.  For me, this came out of thinking about places that were significant to me that have closed, the Emma Center, but also old record shops and places I used to frequent.  But it struck me that there are larger issues that the project could take on.  For instance, it could provide a record of the historically Black neighborhoods that were destroyed by the interstate freeway system, or the institutions built by the 1934 general strike.  I would like to see these micro and macro narratives placed together in the collective project.  Of this, enough.

An Old Arise article I wrote on Protest and Media during the Anti-Globalization Era

One reason I've started this blog is to put some of the stuff that I've written over the years back into public circulation. This is an article that I wrote for a small, free, leftist publication, the Arise! Journal. The Journal was associated with an all volunteer bookstore that I was involved with for a number of years, which recently closed. (The bookstore recently closed, not the journal, which has been defunct for years, now.) This piece gives a good sense of my thoughts on critique and activism at the time of its publication, although I will leave it up to you to determine its present relevance. It was written in response to the coverage of the anti-globalization protests, focusing on independent media. I had evidently discovered Weiss' play Marat/Sade around this time, but decided to falsely attribute the quote to the old revolutionary, rather than the playwright. I've corrected that. Here goes....



Protest Narrative/Protest Praxis


Jean Paul Marat: The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair. To turn yourself inside out and see the world with fresh eyes.
--Peter Weiss (Marat/Sade)

      There is an interesting phenomenon that is worth discussing within the realm of what I will call the 'post-Seattle era of activism which seems to be upon us, that is the phenomenon of independent media. Its imagination has been captured by a series of non-contiguous mass based protest internationally acting as a counterpoint to a totalitarian narrative of globalization. I'm not interested in discussing the merits of those events in and of themselves (whether they are the proper tactics, the issues of various tactical uses of non-violence, etc.). Rather I want to discuss the literature produced in the aftermath of these events in an attempt to legitimize and explain the events that occurred within the protests.

      Within the mood and logic of the movement at this time, a mood in which valorizes and emphasizes action and spontaneity above all things, it may seem strange to put so much emphasis on an activity that is at best deemed marginal within the dominant themes of activism today. The best example of this exists in the fact that we no longer “have protests”, but rather “engage in actions”. But I believe that the production and distribution of a body of “protest narratives” is as important an element to the movement as the protests themselves.

     The vast majority of us weren't at Seattle. And if we were at Seattle then we missed D.C. or L.A. or Prague, but this didn't change the fact that these events were monumental in our lives as activists. We confronted them through a myriad of narratives that were reproduced on the Internet, on various fanzines, magazines, and even the occasional radio or television show. The perceptions that we take from these narratives had and continue to have a deep impact on activism.

     The dominant large media’s narrative on these actions is well known. It goes something like this: There is a protest, it starts off peacefully. At this point in the presentation of the narrative there will be a number of shots of happy people walking on the street, puppets, etc. But as things go along according to the story, people get tired, tempers flare, AND VIOLENCE ERUPTS. This violence is generally attributed to a few violent troublemakers amongst largely peaceful protesters. The police then have to respond to this and the conflict ensues. Eventually the police are able to get things under control and the media discusses with the police on how things went, and occasionally there is a rebuttal by an activist.

    It’s remarkable that the diversity of protests manages to follow such an established pattern: Mayday is ISAG is Seattle is a police brutality rally. And marches and rallies that don’t get into conflicts with the police, well they don’t occur by and large within the narrative of the dominant media. This amnesia is true of truly explosive events as well. For instance, is the coverage of the remarkable events in Argentina?

    Within this narrative there are implicit messages that tie in with a liberal hegemony. The police enable two things within the narrative: The first thing that they do is to assure the liberal right of freedom of speech, but more significantly they control the demiurgic powers that try to push liberal rights into the power of the mob. This narrative is written to assuage the fears of a white middle class audience that is both bathed in the logic of a rights based discourse and trained to fear the ‘other’ in its gendered, racialized, classed, and cultured forms.

     So, we have a narrative in which the massive diverse energies and experiences of protests are shoved into a monolithic form to maintain the status quo in the moment of crisis. But these aren’t the only narratives constructed on this terrain. There are also the narratives of the email list serves, independent media, etc. It may have become a cliché to point out that the Independent Media Center rose during the protests of Seattle, but it is nonetheless still worth mentioning. So it’s worth asking, do these forms of minor media truly cover the protests in all their diversity and complexity? Looking at the evidence, I would have to say no: While there is a response to the dominant media within the minor media, this other narrative, by in large acts as reflection of it and only offer a very shallow alternative to it.

     What is this other narrative? We begin with the same image as the dominant media, the happy protester, et al. However there is a shift at this point, a shift in the blame for the conflict: Instead of being presented with a vision of the violent protester, we see the violent police officer. These officers are the ones guilty of the violence. The few violent actors within the protesters are still there, but they have been recast as agent provocateurs. In short the same middle class audience is being addressed, and the same attempt at domestication occurs.

     I am not suggesting that this mode of discourse should be abandoned completely. There are certainly moments when working on the terrain of liberalism is valuable if not essential, but these moments are not when we are producing our own media for ourselves. These opportunities occur in letters to the editor, call in talk shows on NPR, etc. and other moments of confrontation that are allowed or forced to occur within the dominant media.

     But what we discuss with ourselves should be different matter completely. Are we trying to be good liberal subjects, working within its logic? No. No matter our views on revolution or reform, it would seem that we are trying to do something much different than that. Our protests, our spaces, our communities should act as sorts of laboratories for the production of new kinds of being: The narratives that we produce should reflect back upon our experiments, their successes, their failures, and indecisions.

     I’ll try to unpack what I mean by that. It means, for example, that we need to stop acting surprised that the police attack us. This surprise may be a mask we put on for the liberal media, but we should stop lying to each other. Instead a confrontation with the police can be thought about and presented in different ways: What were some successful responses? Where were our weaknesses? Were there ways that we could have avoided a confrontation with the police, or at very least had that confrontation with the police on grounds that were more advantageous to us? In short, the series of questions that we ask ourselves in our own media needs to moves us from a liberal ideology into the process of a constitutive praxis.

     There may be discussions of the dominant media, but only on the terrain of tactics. For instance, what were interesting ways that the dominant media was positively utilized? In what ways, can there be improvements in utilizing this flawed resource, etc.? In other words, the act of not operating within the ideological norms of the dominant media doesn’t mean that we act like ostriches and pretend it doesn’t exist. Instead we should see it as another element operating within a very complex field of power.

     We also need to break away from the murky forms of mystification that occur within the dominant media. These events didn’t just occur. A complex series of interactions, including planning, advertising, etc. must occur in order for the possibility of the events of the day to even occur. These moments need to be explored as well if we are to create a tool that will aid in the constitutive process I discussed above. In many ways, this area of exploration is considerably more difficult than the day itself. Alliances are fragile and tempers run high. There is a considerable amount of paranoia on the part of many participants, both justified and not. But if we want to use independent media to open upon new possibilities then we need to start discussing the processes that will get us there in their failures and successes.

    There are examples of this type of reporting already. For instance, in the April issue of Z Magazine there is a very good article on the Pacifica crisis (Pacifica Radio Crisis Is Settled, By Andrea Buffa). The article moves beyond the easy territory of claiming victory for the progressive forces of Pacifica. It instead looks at the successes and problems that occurred within the process. It gives a very good history of the conflict and asks very difficult questions. For instance, it constantly examines the dimensions of race within the process. Why is it that the democratic processes of KPFA are so incapable of getting activists of color involved? Why is it that well-known activists of color were so often on the other side of the debate? In other words, it examines a contradiction that exists within many activist circles and points out the way that it operated in the Pacifica situation, while trying to think of ways of dealing with the contradiction.

     I recognize that what I am calling for is not easy. If it were easy, independent media wouldn’t fall back on recognizable narratives. In effect, I am trying to advocate an attempt to represent what is unrepresentable within traditional representational forms. I am advocating a course that will take alternative journalism from the safe course of abstract advocacy into the dangerous waters of playing a part in the process as a reflection on it. The traditional approaches to covering protests are not particularly contentious. They don’t challenge us or demand anything of us, and we need a media that does those things. New possibilities for action, alliances, and forms of being already exist. We need to excavate them from the morass of the dominant media and the logic of this society.


(The International Society of Animal Genetics held its conference within the Twin Cities in the late-summer/early autumn of 2000.  Direct action street protests were organized in response.  The expected national turnout didn’t pan out, and there were very few demonstrators, perhaps 150.  The disaster around this protest lead to the freezing of the militant spirit that had came out of the Mayday demonstration.  The earlier Mayday protest had been a highly successful and militant street demo, that had brought together anarchists, HERE Local 17 workers and activists, along with a large section of other Minneapolis activists.)