Wall Street Journal - June 9, 1999
Disaffected Youth Dust Off A Combustible Philosophy
By PETER WALDMAN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
EUGENE, Ore. -- This university town of 150,000 is known for its liberal attitudes, moderate cost of living, environmental sensitivity and good cappuccino. Now it is known for something else: anarchists.
In recent months, young radicals calling themselves the Black Army Faction have led a campaign of vandalism and arson attacks on businesses here, including a riot at a downtown Nike store in October. Black-hooded youths smashed windows and dumped merchandise into a fountain, Boston Tea Party-style.
Emma Goldman Papers http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman
The young anarchists' mentor is John Zerzan, a 55-year-old writer of books and essays who thinks humanity's best hope lies in smashing civilization back to the days of hunters and gatherers. The recent anarchist resurgence heartens him. "I was beginning to think I'd get old and die before things heated up again," he says.
Eugene is an unlikely center for an anarchist revival -- some of it violent -- now sweeping through circles of disaffected youth in the U.S. Though still more ripple than groundswell, the new anarchists are young people, mostly white, whose violent tendencies are causing increased concern in light of the recent murder spree by two students at Columbine High School.
Scratch the surface, or Internet sites, of some of the most active social and environmental grass-roots groups today and young, self-described anarchists rear up from the core. "The fuzzy left is dead. People are tired of compromises," says Nestor Makhno, nom de guerre of the founder of the Mission District Yuppie Eradication Project in San Francisco. The group promotes vandalism against upscale restaurants, condos and cars in its war on neighborhood gentrification. Mr. Makhno was recently detained by San Francisco police and released without charge.
Anarchism, advocating that people govern themselves in small, consensual groups with no institutions of authority, peaked as a U.S. political movement with Chicago's Haymarket Riot in 1886. European immigrants revived the philosophy in the 1920s, and it enjoyed another upswing in the 1960s and 1970s in places like Eugene.
'Death of the Planet'
What distinguishes today's young anarchists, however, is their palpable despair. "They're wrapped up with issues like the death of species, the death of the planet," says Howard Besser, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, who studies the social and cultural effects of technology. AK Press, a five-year-old San Francisco publisher, now has more than 60 anarchist books in print, a spokesman says. Sales of works by Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist whose political writings many anarchists devour, have quintupled since 1994. Hits on the Emma Goldman Papers Web site exceed 10,000 a month.
An anarchist icon envisions the demise of corporations.
Food Not Bombs, an anarchist collective that serves free vegetarian food to homeless people in public parks, has grown from eight founders in Boston in 1981 to some 200 chapters world-wide. Anti-Racist Action, a Columbus, Ohio-based network of anarchist skinheads and punk rockers who confront white supremacists, claims 140 chapters across the country.
And the Biotic Baking Brigade, a loose band of guerrilla pie-chuckers attempting to make political statements, has creamed 17 noses of late, including Bill Gates's and Milton Friedman's.
Other groups are more ominous. Eugene's "anarchist kids," as they're known, have made Oregon's second-largest city a closely watched laboratory for anarchists and law-enforcement officials elsewhere. A local newsletter, Black-Clad Messenger: Actualizing Industrial Collapse, recently printed lessons on sabotaging cars by putting shotgun shells into mufflers and making firebombs with cigarettes, matches and paper. Its cartoons have glorified murdering politicians and cops.
The newsletter reprinted a letter from the imprisoned Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski -- one of Mr. Zerzan's heroes -- chiding the Nike rioters for diverting attention from "organizations that lie at the heart of the techno-industrial complex, such as computer and biotech companies." And it published an essay on assassination that ended with the entreaty "So do us all a favor and off a corporate CEO! " "That stuff makes me nervous," says Mr. Zerzan, who helps publish the newsletter. "Not because I don't support it, but because I know the cops can use it against us. I don't want to go to jail."
Eugene police say they're baffled by the anarchists. Local cops have years of experience negotiating peaceful arrests with people engaged in civil disobedience, says Police Chief Jim Hill. But the new anarchists "see us as the enemy," he says.
An incendiary anarchist poster.
Even Mr. Zerzan says he is awed by his young comrades' zeal. Every Monday night, 15 to 20 members of the Black Army Faction, a collection of teenage runaways, high-school kids and university hangers-on, meet in his small apartment to strategize.
"You can act now, or you can watch things slowly deplete into nothing," says 23-year-old Fuego, who, like most young anarchists interviewed for this article, would give only her street name. Raised in rural Arkansas, Fuego says she bounced between homes of an alcoholic father and abusive mother until she was 14, then ran away to live with friends. Social workers found them squatting in the basement of an old house and put Fuego in a juvenile-detention center for four months until sending her back to her dad.
'State Control'
"That was an early realization about what state control is like," she says. Since then, Fuego says, she's bounced around the West, going to anarchist and punk-rocker "squat" houses for food and shelter.
Most young anarchists are opposed to getting a job -- which makes them ripe for Mr. Zerzan's philosophy. He rejects not just government, but also money, work, technology and the whole gamut of "productionist" values underlying modern economies. He advocates "primitivism," in which people work toward destroying all aspects of modern civilization, to live as peaceful wanderers. To support himself, Mr. Zerzan says he works in child care.
Many of Mr. Zerzan's fellow anarchists don't buy his theory of primitivism. "Imagining a people who were totally innocent and uncorrupted is naive and self-hating," says ethnographer and author Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, herself an anarchist and a professor at California State University at Hayward. "We're better off starting with who we are today."
In fact, even some of Eugene's older anarchists criticize the black-clad kids for picking unnecessary fights with police. A few joined a recent candlelight vigil held after a graffiti incident, in which the family van of a community-relations police officer was spray-painted with the words "Die Pig!" "Some of the young people seem to be operating from a place of hate and anger within themselves," says Steve "Sleeve" Boutin, 32, an anarchist who works for a local pacifist group. "If you're going to engage in violence, you've got to do it with a lot of love and strength in your heart."
Eugene held an "anarchist forum" on a recent evening in the county supervisors' hearing room downtown. Here, speakers sidle up to the delicate issue of violence and retreat. Two hundred or so people fill the auditorium for this wrath-venting session, organized by a 26-year-old city councilman, Bobby Lee, to defuse community tensions. Mr. Lee is perhaps the only nonanarchist in the room. With Mr. Zerzan observing silently from the back, poetry is read, a history of "autonomous communities" is recited, and veganism and animal rights are hailed.
As the gathering breaks up, a frustrated firebrand named Sunshine blurts out, "If each of us goes out and torches two cars tonight, everyone in town will wake up and ask, 'What do they want?' "
Often, it's not clear. Sprawled on the living-room floor at the home of one of their parents -- a nurse who is at work -- some of the Black Army Faction ponder their next step. All agree: Trashing property of corporations and the state is legitimate self-defense, given the harm that those institutions inflict on the earth. "Suppose someone blows up Hyundai?" asks 15-year-old Eric, one of the angriest and best-read members, referring to a controversial semiconductor factory nearby. A comrade, whose mother works there, says that's not a good idea.
Later, Mr. Zerzan laughs at the suggestion, then winces. "I don't want to know what they do," he says. "I don't ask them; they don't tell me. Those kids have a passion that doesn't come from me."