> Must be comfortable down in that bunker.
What bunker was that? I didn't see any bunkers in Seattle--except the one Maddy Halfbright was in.
> And of course, the article conflates the window-breakers with the non-vandal
> direct action folks - many of the latter as unapproving of the window
> breakers as the "respectable" types.
Impossible. I know these people. They are NOT stick figures to me. I live near them. I've eaten with them. Gotten high with some of them. Hung from redwoods with them. Confronted bulldozers and angry log truck drivers dozens of miles from the nearest medivac landing spot. The Direct Action people are the same ones who've being laying their bodies on the line out here for a long time. These people didn't just show up in Seattle presto-chango through the prestidigidation of flacks-for-hire like Dolan. They've been doing this for years. They've become quite good at it. They aren't trustfunders, either [most of them]. They live on communes, in abandoned buildings, in crappy apartments, they sell t-shirts, bumperstickers, fix decrepit cars, grow mj, for a bare living, a minimal existence, a life devoted to activism. The anarchists, at least the varieties from Eugene and Reed College in Portland, are another species, entirely. No conflation on my part.
> Well, this is nice clear declaration of war, at least. This is the classic
> sectarian mode- destroy coalitions rather than fight democratically for a
> point of view within the movement.
There's no democracy within these coalitions. It's about power, and you don't have to be deeply versed in Foucault to understand how that works, how the policing mechanism becomes internalized. For a moment--and no one is really under any illusion that it will last--there was a power shift and the street people, in all their ineffable diversity, seized the moment, despite every effort to co-opt them or steamroll them or ignore them or incarcerate them.
What movement are we talking about? Is it a cap *M* Movement? People have been hitch-hiking on that for a long, long time. Nathan, you're sitting back waiting for some Historical Moment, waiting for the by-product of some mutli-speed blender of factions to produce a comfortable synthesis. To paraphrase the great Marxist historian GEM de Ste. Croix (The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World): history's going to produce what it will produce, inevitably, it's true shape and contour visible only at a distance of years, decades, centuries. That doesn't mean that individuals and collectives can't take some matters into their own hands, within or outside the over-arching tumult of the Great Dialectic, if only to let off steam, to scare the pants off some of the suits for a few moments, to enjoy a few hours in a frenzied abreaction of Laingian dimensions.
> it won't be Jimmy Hoffa's,
> but a broader and not always completely uniform message.
No. It will ultimately be translated into something even weaker than Hoffa's message, first distilled through the process of "coercive harmony", then further watered down by the mandarins of realpolitic.