An essay on organizing after the Anti-War Movement

 Here's another older article.  It made me realize that there was a time when Leninists really annoyed me.  Not sure if they've gotten less annoying, I've become more tolerant, or simply my politics have changed.  Probably the last option, to be honest.  The other notable aspect of this essay is the strong influence from Empire.  This was written at the height of my fascination with that book.  I could say more, but I will stop for now.

“We should say right away that this new militancy does not simply repeat the organizational formulas of the old revolutionary working class.  Today the militant cannot even pretend to be a representative, even of the fundamental human needs of the exploited.  Revolutionary political militancy today, on the contrary, must discover what has always been its proper form: not representational but constituent activity.  Militancy today is a positive, constructive, and innovative activity….  In other words, resistance is linked immediately with a constitutive investment in the biopolitical realm and to the formation of cooperative apparatuses of production and community.”

                                    --Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire

“The best response to a bad movie is to make another movie.”

--Jean Luc Godard

            A whole series of demonstrations occurred before and during the early stages of the war.  They were just another moment in a global anti-war movement.  This movement cannot be precisely called new, but at the same time, it has grown to a level that dwarfed its former constellations.  This popularity is leading to a number of contestations both within and without the movement over the matter of representation.  I am not so much interested in debating who is the legitimate “speaker” for this movement, so much as I am interested in looking at the way that contesting groups attempt to represent this movement.  I’ll begin by following the debate between liberals and Leninists, and show where there conflicts come from a certain common ground.  At that point, I’ll begin to discuss the attempts to resist these modes of representation, in both their sense of possibility and their limitations.  At that point, I will try to point to a way out of this morass, not in the sense of a blueprint, but rather in the sense of a process of thought.[1]

            Former SDS head Todd Gitlin has been conducting a formidable campaign against the burgeoning anti-war movement.  He has been able to bring this message to a number of large public venues, ranging from radio to print.  He is only the most significant of a group of liberals making critiques.  Their critiques can be formulated on two large points.  1.  The anti-war movement is far too apologetic to dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il.  2.  The anti-war movement is far too dominated by Leninists, and their modes of expression and messages.  There has been a tradition of dismissing this sort of message as mere red-baiting.  I propose that we take it quite seriously, even if we reject all of its implications in the end.  The call of red-baiting has been for too long a cloak for deflecting the criticisms of Leninists in the movement.  

            The primary charge it seems is the domination of Leninists in the movement.  The other charge, the one dealing with apologism for dictator can be subsumed under the former, as a form of anti-imperialist politics.  Two of the most prominent anti-war movements, the ANSWER coalition, and the Not In Our Name coalition are tied to the Worker’s World Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party, respectively.  Both groups work to obfuscate the role that the Leninist groups play in them.  Both will bring up ‘red-baiting’ at any time that the connection is made. However, the politics of the groups can be seen at points.  For example the ANSWER coalition will never consider criticizing the Iraqi or North Korean regimes because it would be considered to be outside a certain anti-imperialist politic.  This allows for the pro-war forces to claim themselves as a pro-democratic group, opposed by those who support the status quo.

            Both groups by in large use what is referred to as ‘mass line’ organizing in dealing with these movements.  What this form of politics does is to suppress the particular idiosyncrasies of the groups for a politics that the group interprets as that which allows the greatest number to come together.  This creates the desire for a form of organization that emphasizes uniformity and coherence at the sacrifice of creativity and spontaneity.  The level of joy at these forms of marches is frequently related to the distance participants are away from the bullhorns.[2]  This model is in opposition to the one that was emphasized within the anti-globalization movement, which despite its massive problems, rarely led to boredom.  The politics of the ‘mass line’ simultaneously engages with the perceived politics of the crowd, but it closes off the possibility of the crowd transforming itself into something else, a democratic and communicative body, which can come to its own decision making processes and decisions. 

            Why is it that liberals such as Gitlin make these criticisms of the movement?  What is their stake in these criticisms?  I think that the Northestern Federation of Anarcho-Communists illuminates this to some extent.  NEFAC notes that what these Leninist groups are able to within the anti-war movement is to express the project of liberalism better than the liberals do themselves.  They can put the project of human rights and et al much more forcefully than liberals themselves.  In effect, by representing these values, they displace the liberals.  They can do this precisely because unlike mainstream liberal groups, the Leninist groups are not linked to the Democratic Party, and therefore aren’t responsible for the maintenance of the empire or the reproduction of capital.  Therefore, they can speak in the voice of a particular utopian liberal anti-interventionary politics without flinching.

            Before we express a false nostalgia for some liberalism of the past, it’s important to remember that liberalism is just as willing to crush difference within its movements.  The best example I can think of is Todd Gitlin himself.  Gitlin repeatedly criticized, the women’s and queer movements for their abandonment of ‘proper progressive politics’ for the politics of ‘identity’ and ‘lifestyle’, and in effect, refused to recognize the particular needs and desires of the people within the movement who are different.  Liberal groups as diverse as the Human Rights Campaign to the Democratic Party hold to this assimilationist tendency.  Liberals are just as invested in this form of representation as the Leninists.  The antagonism between these two forces is built upon the need to both represent and displace the complex group of actors within the movement.  Liberalism has constantly acted too put the brakes on social movements through its particular forms of representation, to neutralize political movements and transform the organizers into stakeholders and NGOs.  To make the choice between the liberal representative and Leninist one is to choose who is going speak for you, which actions you make are to be allowed to be legible, etc.  In reality, it is no choice at all.

            In response, anarchism has counterpoised the option of spontaneity.  But all too often, this notion of spontaneity is tied in with a certain humanist, essentialist conceptualization of human agency.  In response to that notion of agency, we need counter-pose a notion of spontaneity that is completely materialist, and immanent in nature.  We can find the beginning of such a model in Rosa Luxembourg’s debates with Karl Kautsky.[3]

            In response to Kautsky’s notion that the class struggle will culminate in massive, general strike, Rosa Luxembourg advocates something quite different.  The class struggle in her view builds in fits and starts.  It comes about from the proletariat learning from its own self-action in small strikes, meetings, etc.  This particular form of production of new subjectivities creates the conditions for acts of spontaneity.  The spontaneous act occurs when the proletariat embodies the knowledge that it has produced through these actions.  To put this in more prosaic language, one can think of it in the same sense as driving or riding a bike.  There comes a point that the act of riding or driving becomes unconscious.  Collective political practice works in the same way, through experimentation.

            In this sense, the field of political practice becomes a sort of laboratory.  This creates a need for both using new forms of organization, and looking back at them critically.  The anarchist community has constantly ignored this second element.  It has tended to blithely ignore its weaknesses, or done the opposite, in condemning itself or others in total.  Critique is something else.  It’s not a form of condemnation, or cynicism, as so many activists seem to think it is, rather it is a joyful act.  It allows one to see the possibilities contained in what is seen to be a failure.

            The primary critique I have of the anarchist community comes out of its refusal to organize, and create organizations.  When one looks at the anti-war movement, the people who have made the contacts, created the alliances, and organized the events have been liberals and Leninists.  They are perceived to be the responsible parties within the activist communities.  They also draw of the most responsible of the activists to their cause.  They have created the activist community within their own image.

            Anarchists on the other hand have managed to isolate themselves.  Far too often, anarchists have become a group of slouching adolescents, grumbling about the protest on the sidelines.  Either that or they organize themselves into exclusionary cells in an attempt to create a militancy that has nothing to do with the crowd.  By doing this, they act as a perverse boon to liberal and Leninist grouplets.  It allows them to act as mediators between the crowd and the anarchists.  It makes them appear as responsible actors.  It also makes anarchist look a bit parasitical in their approach to organizing, letting others do the work, and then entering in as if the event was theirs at their command.

            I don’t want to deny that there are some ideas that are worth embracing within the anarchist camp.  The most significant of those is parody.  This tactic has only been taken up a few times as a deliberate tactic; for the most part it comes out of frustration and boredom with the tactics at hand.  This has led to an implementation of this tactic in a manner that tended to be more sullen, and less creative.  Perhaps this can be moved in another direction, one that is less confrontational with the organizers, and is rather a joyful subversion within the process.

            Anarchist culture within and outside the Twin Cities has developed a number of creative and exciting tactics and ideas.  They range from use of bicycles in demonstrations, shields, radical cheerleaders, etc.  We need to recognize these strengths and use them.  Moreover, we need to use them within the crowd, not outside of it in opposition to it.  The crowd is not a homogeneous mass; rather it’s complex, creative, and vibrant.  So far there are two sides to the same coin when it comes to the crowd, the Leninists and liberals want to control it as a homogeneous mass.  Anarchists want to reject for that same reason.  But there is an alternative that doesn’t stand between; rather it rejects the logic altogether.  It recognizes the crowd as an immanent assemblage, differentiated, constantly shifting, and in constant production.  The point is to become a part of this, not to assimilate to it but to contribute to it, and to communicate within it.

            In order to move beyond the current situation, this is a dire necessity.  The anti-war movement has been pushed as far as it can go within its current manifestation and it was a failure.  A failure that has potentials within it, but it is a failure nonetheless.  Perhaps it represents the last flight of a type of representational politics at its dusk.  At this point, we are at a standstill.  In order to move forward we need to create the alliances and contacts that the leninists and liberals have without the representational forms that they engage in.[4] The figure of the organizer is scoffed at by current avant-garde anarchist thought, but it is the organizer that is at the heart of the strongest anarchist projects, the IWW, the CNT-FAI, the student organizers in Paris, etc.[5]

            There ultimately needs to be a break away from this form of representational spectacle.  We need to return to the question of social democracy[6] in the broadest sense of the term, a form of social democratic politic that allows for people to take control of their lives both collectively and individually.  Revolutionary politics can never be based within the notion of charity, the notion of social changed being handed from above from a generous hand.  That mode of thought holds to the same spectacle and representation of helplessness that traps traditional political thought.  It must instead be tied to the notion of mutual aid. It must be tied into what has always been the proper realm of politics, that is, the creation of different relationships between people.  This is a process that must push itself into the realm of production, and touch upon the most fundamental parts of people’s lives.  It must become a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena, not allow itself to stop at any form of standardized, ‘proper’ form of tactic.  It is only at that point can we successfully resist the perpetual war that Empire calls peace.  

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[1] I feel like noting both as a preemptive strike and a moment of modesty that I am critiquing a movement that I am a part of, and that there is nothing in here that does not apply to myself.

[2] I would like to explicitly part from anarchist company on one issue although, that of marshals.  I don’t think that demonstration security is in itself stultifying, and often acts to allow a more diverse crowd.  Those who make this comment, frequently confuse creativity with fighting the police.      

[3] See Rosa Luxemburg “The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions”.  I would also recommend reading Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, as well as Kathi Weeks’ work.

[4] For more on this issue, see my article “Politics and Polemics: A Sort of Response to Michael Wood” contained in a previous issue of the journal.

[5] It is also worth noting that in every one of these situations, there were connections and alliance to people whose project was one of a genuinely radical and democratic marxism.

[6] To avoid the inevitable sectarian backlash that this term brings, I don’t mean this term in the sense of the Social Democratic movement that emerged from the Second International; rather I mean it in a way that can be synonymous with “communism”, “participatory democracy”, or even “anarchism.”  The terms don’t mean that much to me.

A Critique of the Crimethinc Approach to Desire and Play in the Context of Anti-Globalization

I wrote this a couple years ago for a conference on Play at the University of California-Irvine. I think that I was one of the few people who didn't write a paper from the perspective of either psychoanalysis or deconstruction. I've edited this slightly, but I suspect that the critical dimension needs to be expanded considerably. If I were to rewrite this, I think I would work through the material on opportunism that I draw from Virno in greater detail, and would probably think through the question of the common more as well. I would also be tempted to link this to certain aspects of the anti-austerity protests, particularly around dance parties and occupations. However, this would be a long endeavor, as that those actions are quite complex in themselves, and don't map neatly onto the analysis that I provide here. Still, I would be open to its discussion. Ultimately, I think that Crimethinc should be read as a symptom of the complex, exciting, and problematic events of anti-globalization, rather than a critical analysis of them. That work is still needed.

As an opening salvo I would like to recall a pair of images that I recall from a local Quebec newspaper at the time of the Quebec City FTAA protests in 2001. The first image showed a nude man mooning the authorities in front of the fence keeping the protesters away from the conference. The man is replaced by the blast of water in the second image. At this point, there is something similar to my topic at this point in the United States. The a mode of protest organization appeared spontaneously at the 1999 protests at Seattle, and were quickly blown off the maps, if not by the violence of Genoa, then by the extraordinary state violence that came in the wake of the attacks that occurred on September 11. Between those dates a whole series of massive protests occurred at the sites of international trade conferences. The tactics, now effaced by the despondency created by the war and the security crackdown, drew directly from the discourse of play, and made that discourse productive for the protests. The first purpose could be considered the more instrumental of the purposes. The image of play became a way of partially disguising militant action. For instance, a puppet theater disguised shields at a Minneapolis Mayday protest as large puppets. The second purpose becomes both less instrumentalized and considerably more complex. Play also operates as a temporary reconstruction of space and time within the protest. In effect, play becomes the medium in which a ‘new world’ is shown to be possible, both at the constitutive level in the interactions between the protestors and at the level of representation.

There are a number of ways you could take this project. You could go in a historical direction. This would entail producing a narrative of the history of the use of play in social protest movements. After all, play has been a factor in those movements for a considerably longer time than the initial snapshot allows. This would be a narrative that discussed the role played in the practices of the new left in the sixties, the new social movements of the 70’ and 80’s, etc. It would be a story of the yippies, the diggers, ACT-UP and others. A second direction could be to destabilize this conceptualization by provincializing, and asking to what extent does this concept relate to struggles outside the extraordinary comfort granted to fairly comfortable members of the overdeveloped world. These questions will come up in this talk at points, but I want to stay focused on the concept of play as it was developed in this context. My intention is to begin with an examination of the idea from within the logic of the movement. This will draw on the work of an anarchist collective, Crimethinc that took part in the demonstrations and produced a narrative of those events through its various polemics in both book and pamphlet form. The contradictions and problems of this conceptualization will become readily apparent and the talk will shift to work through those issues in order to read the importance of play as a symptom of the structures of post-fordist capital as much as revolt against it. This demystification puts us in the position to re-read play as an ideological construction, although a crucial one within context of the contemporary class struggle.

To return to the initial conceptualization of play, it becomes immediately obvious that this conceptualization bares a strong resemblance to the conception of the space and time of the carnival that Bakhtin presents in his work on Rabelais. For Bakhtin, “the basic carnival nucleus… is by no means a purely artistic form nor a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play.” (Bakhtin 7) Play becomes the key term to understand the radicality of the time and space of the carnival. It operates as a mode of stylization that rewrites the social codes of the time and place. Bakhtin calls it a borderline precisely because of this. It deliberately reshapes and reverses the ideological codes, but this reshaping doesn’t occur purely as an act of spectacle or representation. Instead, it operates as an idealization of radically different set of social relations.

This loops back neatly into the structure of the protests. One of the continual messages of the organizers of the protests was that manner in which the protest took place constituted a model for the type of society that they would like to see. The most obvious example of this was the processes of decision making that were employed for the demonstrations. These processes were open and based on large consensus oriented meetings. But the very way that space was reterritorialized within the large protest sites entered into this as well. Puppets, games, people in costumes as well as other events were used to transform commercial spaces into spaces of utopian imagination. These tactics ranged from simple sit-ins to the destruction of private property. But despite the frequently vitriolic disputes around the question of tactics, a common thread ran through them that emphasized precisely this ability to transform social space. The sit in, the spontaneous puppet theater, or the shattered windows of a Starbucks constituted a glimpse into another world that existed outside the instrumental logic of capital.

Although the rhetoric of the movement feels a bit bombastic and unreal at this point, its important to recognize that this was taken seriously by state authorities as well as by activists. Taken seriously, this play world is no less universal in its logic than the world constructed by capital. To return to the question of the carnival, Bakhtin notes, “While the carnival lasts, there is no life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.” (Bakhtin 7) The idealization discussed above necessarily links into a notion of totality, or universality. Those terms would be anathema to the movements, but nonetheless the slogan “another world is possible” invites this conceptualization. A free world, by this logic would be one that breaks away from the logic of capital altogether through a wide variety of practices of resignification and reterritorialization. The precise nature of that new structure was both unknown and in dispute. In effect, play operated as the medium that allowed these competing visions to coexist and coagulate into a social network. At this point, play takes on a double function. It both constitutes the medium in which the nexus of state and capital is challenged and the instantiation of another possible world radically opposed to both state and capital. We are offered an image of two worlds within the logic of this model, the secretive negotiations of state and capital that seek domination and a world understood through the free association and mutual aid constituted by play.

The group that has made the greatest attempt to mobilize this logic has been the anarchist collective, Crimethinc. Crimethinc was initially formed in 1996, but its visibility increased substantially due to the protests from 1999 to 2001. The group claims that it has no “platform or ideology” and that it operates as a free association of like-minded individuals who political conceptions are constantly in flux. It also allows for the possibility of non-affiliated groups of individuals to take actions in its name. The group also operates a publishing house that has produced a substantial amount of documents in the form of newsletters, posters, books, etc. It has published a number of polemical tracts, poetry, and even a Kerouacesque novel. This work has simultaneously attracted very little mainstream attention, and has become a dominant ideological force within anarchist circles, particularly young anarchist circles. This paradox has been able to occur due to the infrastructure of independent and alternative bookstores and infoshops that can be found nationally and globally. They have also contributed to those bookshops staying open through their sales, which are comparable to the sales of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

The message that these publications offer has been fairly consistent despite the claims that the collective is continual flux. This message has taken on a level of political sophistication and maturity as the publications have occurred. For instance, there is a recognition of white privilege in later publications, that one cannot find in the initial publication, Days of War, Nights of Love. However, there is a theoretical thread that runs throughout the publications that links up to a concept of play that can be found more fully developed in that early publication. This book also remains the best selling book of the collective, and therefore the book that is most commonly taken as the group’s political philosophy. There is something remarkably paradoxical in its discursive operations. The book can be described as both extraordinarily naïve in its theoretical sophistication and a fairly sophisticated understanding of marketing. Although it would be tempting to read this contradiction through a lens of manipulation, I will eventually argue that the very sincerity of the contradiction is move revelatory.

The word play only appears once in Days of War, Nights of Love; however it appears a critical moment in the book. The chapters are organized in a roughly alphabetical order, moving from A for Anarchy to W for Work. The reference to play occurs at the end of the chapter entitled politics. The chapter makes an argument that former modes of radical politics have failed to create the changes that they have ostensibly attempting to create because its ‘irrelevance.’ This irrelevance is revealed by boredom. This boredom points to a loss of what the collective sees as an origin of revolutionary, which might be called a vitalist excitement. A genuinely radical politic points to some sort of authentic origin that constitutes both a means and ends of a new society. Contained within this theorization is a rejection of any mode of instrumentality. This is phrased in the following manner. “Acting in a way that is tedious, tiresome, and oppressive can only perpetuate tedium, fatigue, and oppression in our lives.” (Crimethinc 191) The essential joy and light of the revolution is opposed by the dull grey of responsibility. For the folks of Crimethinc, the opposition set up earlier in the paper can operate in terms of a moralistic obligation of capital versus the novum or novelty of the revolution, a novum that is both completely natural and constantly in danger of destruction through tedious analysis. Play then becomes the privileged site for this sort of revolt. The group ends with a call to action. “Join us in making the “revolution” a game; a game played for the highest stakes of all, but a joyous carefree game nonetheless!” (Crimethinc 192)

This theory of the spontaneous nature of revolt is linked to a particular theory of desire, which can be called both utopian and naïve. Desire becomes the authentic force that points to an ethos of freedom. The book opens with what could read as an advertising pamphlet that opposes an empty homogenous conception of time to another possibility only expressed negatively. It states, “How are you affected by holding back your desires?” It then follows with a list of things lost to the ‘delay or denial of pleasure.’ This list emphasizes the spontaneous, the authentic, the animal, and the wild. This is also linked to both the possibility of adventure and the possibility of danger. Tapping into this space creates the possibility of not only being a subject rather than an object in your life, but it also allows you to become the figure of the sovereign itself. But this sovereignty that is gained from play, is a very strange one. It is placed in opposition to power. For the collective, a gaze of power is necessarily not a gaze of desire. Power is necessarily linked to the repressive, the restrictive, the boring.

This element links the collective’s ideas to a strain of individualist anarchist thought, particularly the work of Max Stirner. Stirner argues for a radically nominalist concept of the individual that emphasizes the autonomy of that individual that is linked to the unique ‘properties’ held by each individual that must be absolutely respected against any collective concepualization that will damage that property. The sovereignty invoked by Crimethinc ties directly into that idea of the individual, and explains why the group is so terrified of being identified as a movement. Stirner feels that any ‘meta-narrative’ is both a fiction and a substitution of the essential qualities of the individual. This thread runs through to the work of Crimethinc when they reject the notion of movement. A movement is no longer a “convergence of unique desires.,” which would protect and foster the individual properties of those desires. Instead, it becomes “a standard for what those desires should be—or at best a model for how to integrate different desires.” (Crimethinc 168) The transindividualism of the movement then becomes the space of inauthenticity and repression.

This radically individualist conception produces a fairly substantial contradiction with the conception of collectivity emphasized by the idea of mutual aid as developed by Kropotkin, which is also invoked by the group through the invocation of love and community as equally authentic sites of radical possibility. Kropotkin developed the theory in response to the popular uptake of Darwin in the second half of the 19th century. Rather than emphasizing competition as the key to strength and survival of a species, Kropotkin looks at the modes of cooperation that occur both in the animal world as well as the human world, and argues that it is this cooperation that is the key to survival. In effect, the theory of mutual aid challenges the notion that society needs the vertical dimension of sovereignty and the state in order to produce social space. At the same time, this conception challenges the earlier notion of the individual as theorized by Stirner. Similarly, any invocation of community necessarily undoes the essential qualities of an individual, particularly a conceptualization that rejects the liberal distinction between public and private as Crimethinc does.

Play becomes the way of negotiating through this substantial contradiction between the sovereign individual and the collective vision of mutual aid. It allow for mutual aid to be marked off as the space of converging individual desires, rather than marking an “integration” of desire that necessarily marks the space of movement. It stitches together the contradictory narrative of the individual’s desire as sovereign and the modes of collectivity that are implicit within the idea of mutual aid. This stitching doesn’t constitute either a synthesis of these contradictory elements nor is a form of mediation. Instead, play allows for an oscillation between the two that operates less as a mode of integration and more as an eclecticism that skips between rule system to rule system in a manner equivalent to the music of Mike Patton or John Zorn. This movement between contradictory structures of subject formation is both opportunistic in its negative valiance and improvisitory in positive one, but it cannot be read as a mode of instrumental cynicism. This reading is thrown out precisely because of the emphasis on the element of spontaneity that is emphasized within the conceptualization of play. Instead, it needs to be read on the unconscious terrain of ideology, remembering that when this term is invoked it is meant as a starting point of the class struggle and not false consciousness.

Before we move into the contradictions and problems with this mode of improvisation or opportunism, I want to emphasis its ability to mobilize particular people. Within the youth community of anarchists, Crimethinc has taken on what might be called a hegemonic role. I think that this has occurred for three significant reasons. The first is that it argues that there is an intuitive revolutionary drive within young people and that they already have something to contribute to politics. Simultaneously, it cultivates this revolutionary subjectivity through the set of divisions that have already been discussed. Despite its dismissal of subculture, it constitutes a set of social networks based on style of dress, speech and other modes of signification. Last, it offers open form of sexuality that challenges the cynical forms of sexual education that have come about in the pas twenty years. As frustrating as the structure can be, it has become the mode of mobilization for middle class anarchists.

But at the same time, there have been some serious contradictions that have shown some of the problems of this combination of free desire, play, and spontaneity. The most immediate of those is the question of sexual assault within activist communities. Within a year of the major protests, anarchist sub-cultures across the country were being torn apart by issues of sexual violence. Although Crimethinc has no responsibility for this situation, it nonetheless provided a serious challenge to the narrative that the organization provided, a narrative that opposed a libratory desire with the repressive desire of the state. However, the minute one deals with the question of violence or sexual violence within intimate relationships, it becomes impossible to ignore the forms of power and domination that constitute the terrain of the social. The fantasy that domination is the sole property of a malignant sovereign who wields it against an innocent people becomes transparently untenable. To the extent that desire is constitutive force, it contains the possibility of producing radical and free social assemblages, but at the same time, it can create fascist or neo-liberal assemblages. To put it into other terms, it has to be understood as a terrain of struggle that cuts through us, rather than a source of authentic liberation.

Another immediate challenge came to the refusal of responsibility implicit in the concept of play as provided by Crimethinc through the question of raising children within activist communities. The most notable form of this challenge came through an essay put together by the group, RAMBL (the name had multiple meanings from Radical Activist Mother and Baby League to Radical Anarchist Mother and Baby League, with other variations.) The group challenged the ways that the activist and anarchist subculture made its spaces and activities inaccessible to parents and children through indifference, neglect, and, at times, hostility. The group demanded that meetings, protests, and collective spaces responded to the needs of children, through meaningful forms of childcare, spaces that were safe for children, and safe spaces in protests. Indirectly, they critiqued the subculture’s investment in spontaneity, precisely because of the ways that discourse privileged certain bodies, and restricted others. They demanded democratic planning to create new forms of access, and as significantly, they demanded that men take responsibility and sacrifice a portion of their privileged autonomy in order to contribute to this labor. In effect, they returned to a politics of reproductive labor, which cannot be accounted for within the Crimethinc narrative, despite the move on the part of the group towards a far less heteronormative concept of sexuality.

The two examples point to moments in which Crimethinc opportunistic linkage of the individualist and collectivist strains of anarchism break down. They break down because the forms of homogeneity that allow for that linkage to exist can no longer be assumed. In effect, the forms of common that must operate within the logic of mutual aid become labored, that is, they become deliberate, rather than assumed, frameworks created by their participants rather than created for them. It’s notable that the audience for Crimethinc is homogenous in age and race, although not always in income status. Within that context, the obvious structures of power they operate in appear to be simplified, with the figure of the parent or principal standing in for the figure of the sovereign. However, this obfuscates the larger structures of capital that those figures operate within. When we look at the demands for immediacy and liberation made by Crimethinc, they have an uncanny resonance to the utopian promise made by the commodity form itself. This logic, which is most evident in advertising, continually offers the promise of fulfillment through the act of purchase. In its conceptualization of an opposition to the fantasy of a stultifying and conformist capitalist designed around the mass subject, the Crimethinc collective have ignored the transformations that have occurred within the logic of capitalist accumulation. Unwittingly, they have uncritically replicated the logic of the pleasure of the commodity of late capitalism. That promise and its falsity must be engaged with within our struggles, but critically. Crimethinc is absolutely correct in its demand for a politics of joy, but its embrace of the logic of the commodity doesn’t provide for the radicality needed to challenge the deceit, misery, and violence of capital. It does not take the production of the common seriously enough, the only space which can create revolutionary politics of joy.

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.)