> that women are involved is hardly the issue. this kind of response belies
> an inability to "get it" and may be why--*may* be--anarchism won't have an
> appeal to anyone other than kids from relatively privileged backgrounds.
> as i read these exchanges and the [i hope] tongue-in-cheek self-ironic
> commentary on the total hip kewlness of arnarchist fashion and attitude, i
> have to wonder just exactly what is going on. now, don't get me wrong. i
> never once denounced those actions and found all the concern over them to
> be quite beside the point when the debates where had here. furthermore,
> i'd consider myself much more of an anarchist; i thoroughly detest
> top-down, bow before the campaign slogans of an ossified, bureaucratic
> marxism. nonetheless, i am a little concerned with the above statement and
> i do wonder about the point of smashing storefronts. i have no problem
> with symbolic protest. it is necessary and inevitable and you only have to
> look at the history of labor struggles and boycotts that have always
> accompanied them to find it. you know, the 60s radicals that helped us
> devise strategies for protesting the gulf war suggested, based on their
> experience, that we ought to appropriate the flag first, before the counter
> protestors did. and so we did. i'm sure doug wants to loose his
> breakfast: it does sound as if it's capitulating to and ultimately
> promoting blind nationalism. but it worked in the sense that it wasn't so
> easy for others to paint us as a bunch of unamerican flag burning freaks.
> and it was the way i felt at least: king's "letter from a birmingham jail"
> and hughes' "what does america mean to me" really resonated with me
> --those immanent critiques of what had yet to be realized for all
> people--and i hadn't yet read all the postmodernist critiques of
> universalism, essentialism, humanism (=nationalism) yet. ;-) i guess
> what i'm struggling to say is--and this comes from my own exp. in these
> kinds of protests--why not grab on to some symbolic performances that catch
> "them" off guard, that "they" can't denounce so easily, that "they" do not
> expect?
I've been an activist and anarchist for over 15 years. I cut my eyeteeth on South African divestment protests and got arrested for civil disobedience. In 1986 I was arrested duing an anarchist riot in Chicago (Haymarket 1986) for disobeying the cops. I'm all in favor of just about every strategy that was used in Seattle, from the town meetings to the street occupation to the window smashing. My experience as an activist has shown me that one should not limit one's toolkit. You can't use the same socket wrench for every situation.
What we are seeing post-Seattle is a lot of reactionary conservatism on the part of the older activists. There's been a lot of "you can't do that, because in the 1960s blah blah blah happened." There's also too much concern with "our image." This is pretty evident in your post above. Yes, we have to worry about our image, but the problem is that we DON'T HAVE ONE. Other than the standard "in a protest reminiscent of the 1960s..."
The window smashing WAS a symbolic protest. If anything, in light of the tremendous damage that international capital is doing to our environment and to workers, it was perhaps to restrained. After all, in many parts of the world, it ain't a protest until a cop car gets torched. Here in the U.S. we have this experienced activist class that seems to be more worried about our ratings compared to Ally Macbeal, then if we actually accomplish something towards our goals.
It can't be denied that the Seattle protests, in total, were inspirational to many people. They radicalized many folks and more importantly, got other people interested in radical social change. They recharged the batteries of many veteran activists, who have been ground down by the Cold War and the years of Reagan-Bush-Clinton.
The successful smashing of multinational stores at the Seattle protest did catch THEM off guard. It put a big mess of eggs on their face. People around the world saw that some Americans were so disgusted with capitalism, that they were willing to smash stuff to display their anger. It put a lie to the propaganda that everybody is happy in this "miracle economic boom." I'm sure that it played well in Peoria too. Folks may feel uncomfortable with the window-smashing, but they do have a visceral hatred of the Wall Marting of their communities.
I think this is why the Seattle actions disappeared from the screen and papers of the boss media so quickly. They could have easily spent weeks demonizing the anarchists and street occupiers as backward anti-American elements. They didn't do this. Why? Does the ruling class understand the threat that Seattle poses to their ruling ideology, the one that say that history has ended and that capitalism is the logical outcome of eons of human history?
-- << Chuck0 >> Homepage: http://flag.blackened.net/chuck0/home/ Mid-Atlantic Infoshop: http://www.infoshop.org/ Alternative Press Review: http://flag.blackened.net/apr/
Free Leonard Peltier! http://www.freepeltier.org/
"A society is a healthy society only to the degree that it exhibits anarchistic traits."
- Jens Bjørneboe