Archive for October, 2008

By Open Society for the Lottery’s End

The Revolution is Just an Old Saying

We are conscious of the need for a social revolution. Everywhere the degradation seems to deepen as our distance from our relation to it widens. We are conscious of the need to engage seriously in a war of appropriation against a society of dispossession, withdrawal, and exhaustion. As with any goal of social transformation, the process of anarchist revolution requires an understanding of the social context we live in, the barriers against class solidarity, and our strategy for getting what we want.

We believe in the possibility of revolution because we have tasted it in brief moments of revolt. Yet in these moments we expect defeat because defeat has always, eventually, greeted us in the end. If we believe in the possibility of revolution –and many have put their faith in the present state of defeat –then why do the same strategies of anarchist action persist? There is obviously a problem with insufficient qualitative and quantitative capacities. Then there is also the pervasive cynical demolition of subversive imagination. What cannot be imagined of us can never exist.

If it is revolution we want, then how do we initiate, organize, and participate in revolutions? I do not mean revolution as one event. It is a process in motion, a spreading defiance of domination, the revival of mutual aid and cooperation, and the use of our subversive capacity to refuse instead of reproduce this society.

The counter-summit is fresh in our memory. Its perceived defeats are studied and its self-affirmed victories are celebrated. It seems to be our only reference point for mass action anymore. Thousands of police greet us and then beat us in planned engagements. This strategy towards anarchy-in-action has yielded few lasting ruptures and plenty more cycles of limited advance and permanent retreat. The present course of activity conceals within it unrealized potentials. What is our potential for revolutionary subversion? What is our capacity for revolt?

Towards the mutuality of autonomous struggles, A disclaimer for those sensitive to critique

Critique is never meant to degrade or weaken the projects of comrades who share our dream of revolution. We are no specialists of critique; no one is. Likewise, we expect our comrades to exert a similar effort towards critically reflecting on our own projects. If anything, revolutionary critique strengthens methods and approaches to social struggles, always with the aim of becoming movements of self-organized uncontrollability. It is with this in mind that pertinent questions must be raised of the renewed enthusiasm for the counter-summit.

A Less Congratulatory Look at Seattle, 1999

It would be foolish for us to deny the effects of direct action and counter-demonstrations at the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in 1999. It has become a reference point for the revival in anarchist ideas and action in the U.S. In the aftermath, what did this movement lead to? While the institutions of global finance and exploitation suffered a crisis in pushing through some of its projects, the anti-capitalist movement chased the same formula for action. And it comes as little surprise considering its logic. The movement’s focus remained on organizing opposition to the economic and political summits of the social order. Yet the WTO is simply part of the capitalist process that has been developing globally for hundreds of years. Capital seeks constant expansion. Its largest projects in no way diminish its established daily project of exploitation and reproduction. The further we get away from locating struggle in our daily lives, the less we can sustain the expansion of the revolutionary project. Capital has proven itself effective in its expansion. Have we?

Some will point to what Seattle represented in terms of a revival in radical opposition to capital. This is undeniable. They could also point to the failures of the negotiations of the WTO, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank as telling signs of a powerful movement. It was powerful, yes, but what kind of power and towards what end? What we hear less about is the failure of the anti-globalization movement to mount broader and more subversive campaigns against an already global capitalism after the chaos in Seattle. The element of surprise is long lost. The strategy of counter-summits largely failed to expand the subversive capacity of anarchists, though it did increase the establishment of black blocs and infoshops as the cornerstones of our progress. The summit remained a point of reference for many single issues within divided capitalist life and a way of acting against domination far from that which is experienced immediately. The attack mounted against the summit was thus confined to a removal from everyday space and daily struggles.

Why would we have any desire to recreate the Seattle WTO riots? The chaos of Seattle happened nearly a decade ago. Today the city’s developers and politicians market a “green” city organized for rich liberals. Let’s not forget the scum Billionaire Gates and many others like him. The legacy of the Seattle WTO thus expresses itself as another historical footnote in a place that has extinguished its memory by necessity. Nothing changes that cannot be sustained. What cannot be sustained dissipates and disappears in time. Capital sinks its insatiable teeth again and again. Even before the smashed windows are replaced, everyone goes back to work. Of course, we were affected by the affirmation of uncontrollable rage in Seattle, but our rage needs directions if we are to win something more substantial than photo-essays and street tactic studies.

The Reemergence of Conventional Approaches

An energy is building once again for the counter-convention. Nearly a decade after the spark of the Seattle WTO revolts of 1999 and the following years of movement in favor of counter-demonstrations, some analyses are left unexplored. The effective culmination of the anti-globalization has dissipated, lost to practical amnesia and its ineffectual responses to alienated daily life. In the years following what was seen as a critical juncture, the movement for autonomy grew, then stagnated, recessed, and burnt out. The traps of activism and its logic of life-as-issues missed necessary self-critiques. It is this spirit of critique we hope to contribute to, not as a means of being divisive but in hopes of developing revolutionary strategies outside of spectacular dead ends and the limitations of militancy. If we want anarchy, shouldn’t we prepare more lasting foundations for it rather than replicate a dissipating chaos? Chaos erupts with or without us. Organized riots rarely compare to the destruction of riots unplanned.

The figureheads, capitalist puppet masters, servants and representatives of political rule meet again; Democrat and Republican, loyal and servile, all being equally detestable and overwhelmingly effective in ruling life inside and outside of their borders. Our hatred towards their social order demands directions, strategies, ideas, and plans of action. Our love for anarchy demands more reflection and insight. Already we sense that the show of force, the development of organization in street battle, and the joy of destruction seen in the summer of June 2007 in Germany against the Group of Eight (G8) has invigorated feelings of great possibility in opposing the social order.

And yet fundamental questions and critiques, those already put forth and those attained through critical analysis, are being neutralized. Their neutralization takes the same discourses: a pondering of spectacles, organized militancy, financial costs, the brief disruptions of normality, the limited and tenuous controlling of terrains. A wider critique of the counter-summit is denied by rationalizing the directions already taken; it’s as if the path itself leads us on its own way. Do we envision these struggles leading towards social revolutions? The question frames our approach to strategy. An obsession still holds power within the implied need to demonstrate in the streets at all. Street tactics, radical infrastructure for brief periods of revolt, and organizing reaction to the social order’s spectacular events dominate the discussion. For those with active criticism, it is a chance to unleash a little bit of hell when the opportunity presents itself. It’s direct action in practice, a practice of our principles that we carry with us everywhere. It is both the means and end of our anarchist principles but it is not a strategy for revolution. Revolution needs widespread participation.

When do we discuss our current capacity for revolt, its limitations, and its expansion?

What We Do There

In Denver and St. Paul the lapdogs of order arrest us in mass because they risk nothing to do so. Even the media, that vehicle for unquestioned relations of mediation, became a state target. There were no wildcat strikers demanding our comrades’ release, no barricades on the highways, no nights filled with a hundred acts of retribution. In Pittsburgh some rebels attacked banks under the cover of night in solidarity with those facing repression. Why were these actions of solidarity the exception? We must ask ourselves how we are still so few without receding into the corpses of cynicism and self-fulfilling defeat. We are anarchists because we believe in people’s capacity and desire to revolt. How is it our class continues to eat shit in the social war? Never has the state exerted more control over us. Never before has our class appeared more atomized, defenseless, and subjugated. And yet revolutionaries who fear new strategy and direction will forever make claim to something of the past.

At the counter-demonstration, we bring conflict to the passivity of mass demonstrations but are cornered, rounded up, and ground through the legal system for it. We are weeds that cannot grow; mice running through the maze. Our movements are studied; our repression is fine-tuned for success. Repression takes the upper hand when it controls our capacity in these situations. It wins against a force with little capacity or numbers for countering the force of a militarized city or for taking back territory from the rule of property.

Today we demonstrate the message of uncontrollable chaos. This chaos liberates space from control but through the media lens, it creates spectacles for passive audiences. In the theater of media spectacles, no one needs to move or be moved. A riot sells the evening news just as well as catastrophic flooding. The independent journalist documents the repression only to find that it is no longer new news but merely another document in a large catalogue of the state going unchallenged. Our message is that we are small and our ability for social war limited. Our message to anyone that we do not communicate to ourselves is a message someone else dictates. We cannot deny the influence of the media on our movements. We depend on it for information of events. Hidden within the images and news reports of revolt lies a relationship of mediation, of passivity, of distortion. We do not escape this mediated divide between actor and audience.

There is no message in the media that causes any politician to tremble. City blocks filled with demonstrators marching on designated parade routes, surrounded by thousands of armed cops, means something mostly to us: we are not alone. It only takes a few individuals to make transformation possible. What transformation is it that we seek? When the project of countering the political convention ends, as it does with the end of the convention, this project of transformation ends. It does not disappear; it disperses. The radical infrastructure that remains is now free to be used, but for what, another counter-convention?

Effective opposition to politics finds its expression through the widespread realization of power and the organization of initiatives for refusal and mutual aid. Mass refusal of politics will take its most effective form in relations of active solidarity. As bonds of solidarity grow, so does our network of revolt, so does our social base. Solidarity is a relation of shared autonomous power and mutuality. In solidarity we find the essence of revolt against domination. None of us can carry a revolution through by ourselves nor do we wish to. Revolution will transform our relations with everyone. The stronger our relationships of autonomy and mutuality, the more people will wish to participate, the greater our victories multiply. The state succeeds today through generalized alienation, passivity, and internal class division. Today we build relations of intimacy, trust, direct action, and class solidarity. We cannot wait for this essential practice. We must develop it today.

Building Diminished Capacities

If a political convention provides an opportunity to do things that cannot be done on a day-to-day basis, how does a revolutionary trajectory ever unfold under this circumstance? If anti-political forces demonstrate a show of force, towards what end does this take us and how does it build longer revolutionary strategies? If these mass mobilizations inspire renewed energy, what is this energy used for and how does a counter-convention demonstrate avenues in which this energy can build momentum outside of these demonstrations? Why do we find it easier to act with a mass of radicals from far away places at a counter-summit, than to form the basis for revolt amongst our co-workers, neighbors, and friends at home? Our work will take greater effort than organizing intermittent demonstrations.

How will the organizational skills that developed from attacking and blockading the conventions be useful to those that return home? In what way can we assume this will strengthen one’s own local projects? The political control of daily life needs no convention center to function. It is bound up in a generalized conformity to the laws of rulers and the calendar of exploitation. The police are effective at control as the sanctity of obedience goes unbroken. Repression succeeds in containing the floods of rage. Subversion comes from those who refuse their role in this relationship. Any real talk of becoming a threat to the foundation of capitalist society must include the subversion of daily reproduction, the development of revolutionary relations of mutuality and autonomy, and the taking of territories.

We return home to unaffected social conditions. Those of us who never made it pat ourselves on the back for avoiding tear gas and mass arrests. We nonetheless must confront the same question: how does our opposition to politics affect revolution in our daily environment? Our significance in one locality should never be understated. Capitalist life exists everywhere outside the security cordons of the palace steps.

Questions remain. If we are working to make another world possible, how can we create this world without applying ourselves vitally in the space and time of daily life? Certainly, there is no way to deny the skill-development and revolutionary joy of fighting police, attacking city structures, freeing movement within territory, and organized autonomy. The difficulty lies not in developing our struggle through these moments of planned revolt but of how our revolt can take on revolutionary directions by spreading and evolving into movements that can develop, grow, defend, and sustain themselves. The counter-convention is worthy of critique only by its failure in building our capacities for anything other than street battle and limited blockades. At home, in work, at the store, in the neighborhood, there is a crisis of social relations that is far more detrimental to revolution. Social relations that replicate alienation bridge no barriers between the mutuality of social needs, desires, and struggles. In the aftermath, we count our successes and our losses. It’s hard to fight battles we don’t have the capacity to win. The crisis of inter-personal alienation breeds itself endlessly in the terrain of social relationships and thus fragments class potentialities. Divided we kneel, divided we fall.

So our question then is, how does the effort, organization, and strategy that constitutes the counter-demonstration contribute to revolutionary goals like building the capacity of an autonomous social base? We prepare for street war without standing a chance at holding the smallest of territories. We have no actual networks in place to respond to repression. In St. Paul the state attacked our infrastructures pre-emptively with little recourse of our own. Some complained of the repression once again in the language of rights withdrawn, as if the state should be expected to do anything otherwise. Likewise, we must admit the failure of the Seattle police to prepare effectively to prevent the WTO riots in 1999. Years afterwards, they greet the most pacified of demonstrations with corridors of patrol cars, motorcycles, and bike police. The state learns quickly from the rules of routine engagement. They learned from their weaknesses and went on to teach other cities’ police units in the art of street repression. What did we learn from Seattle? New strategizing in street confrontation has given us little advantage in street battles: the police largely plan to contain organized chaos. New strategies for counter-summits didn’t avert the burn out of the past decade. The police control the territory of the city. What do we control?

Not everyone can be a militant, but anyone can exert some kind of resistance and solidarity depending on their inclinations and capabilities. The further we develop networks that are capable of initiating struggle, the greater our subversion of passivity can grow. We shouldn’t be afraid to make plans for revolution.

Another Protest Is Possible, But What Else?

The only thing we can demonstrate to our rulers now is our continued inability to impede their running of our daily lives. Concessions appease those who have always looked for appeasement—aspiring politicians, leftists, NGO professionals and single-issue activists. We see them on the streets with us, deluded and chasing fantasies of various brands of justice. When they appeal for a demonstration of democratic dissent, we respond with the riot. The tactics of one vie for legitimacy over the other. And still, even a demonstration of uncontrollability is a planned reaction to controlled events. Thousands of militarized police, weapons of crowd control, and structures for mass detention are developed early on and adjusted accordingly as their surveillance of “threats” become better informed over time. The element of surprise is by nature limited in these encounters.

Calm is restored when everyone goes home. Calm is the city we return to while our dream of burning barricades still smolders in the folds of memory and imagination. The calm truces of a false social peace are what still win in every place where normality is left unshaken.

And when the spectacles of politicians and capitalists fail to run smoothly, as they have in Seattle or Rostock or St. Paul, these people will enjoy their luxury accommodations and go home. Afterwards, just as before, they plan their partnerships and contentions for power in closed meetings, alongside all the decisions and negotiations constantly made by statesman and capitalists, without us, whenever it suits them. When daily life remains confined to the same activity and structures they’ve built, their power maintains the initiative within the social war. The failure or debilitation of international economic negotiations or agreements is a victory in some sense. In other senses, it merely indicates resistance to the acceleration of exploitation and our opposition to the monopolies that wish to compete for the greatest share of the wealth. Capitalist exploitation preceded the WTO, World Bank, and IMF. We mount an attack on the meetings of politicians while the gears of the factories and workplaces continue to turn and the arteries of commodity distribution –the highways, airports, and rail lines –remain undisrupted. Without widespread revolutionary activity, some of their most ruthless initiatives might be shelved, but can we even sustain this effort? And is it the most effective way of challenging capital or politics?

There is lots of talk about tactics and repression. These are the details of battle. Less heard is a fundamental examination of how it contributes to our revolutionary aims. Attacks on the palaces, convention centers, and sacred spaces they conspire in will feel like war but the war is waged everywhere, all the time. One city, for a few days, seems like a small place and short time to set our sights on. We want to level the city but instead smash a few of its windows. How can sabotage spread throughout the social terrain?

We have always extended our solidarity to those who have chosen conflict over passivity, dignified struggle over indifference. The combatants who turned parts of St. Paul into a battleground existed in a moment of uncontrollable rebellion. Our extension of solidarity however must also extend itself through practical analysis.

Learning Something New from History, Re-Imagining Possibilities

Every day we feel the rulers’ decisions with immediacy. Daily life is the only reality we must ultimately contend with. It is in the established movements of every day that the system is reproduced, strengthened, and maintained. It is also in the spaces of daily life, and what activity takes place here, that possibly takes concrete form. If the counter-summit presents an opportunity to appreciate “strength in numbers,” why are we not building a far more qualitative, widespread, and lasting social base in the places we inhabit daily? Networks of autonomy grow in power as they spread. It will start small, as we are now, and expand as we become more effective at building bonds of solidarity and mutual aid with our class. The autonomous social base gives us the ability to mount real campaigns against capital and its servants. We can’t simply hope for better revolutionary conditions for revolt. We will have to be the condition. Faced with the reality of alienation, our capacities grow as we confront the atomization and competition within our class.

Resistance must affect daily social reproduction or it will not sustain or expand its revolutionary potency. Again, where do we go from here? Autonomy must expand in the spaces and relations of daily life. These relations then strengthen the capacity of networks of autonomy to spread, carry out initiatives, and begin to take territory. If we are serious about anarchy, our strategizing for an anarchist revolution must also be taken seriously.

It would be helpful for us to change our assumptions that our numbers are too small and thus our capacities too little for creating situations of subversion outside of demonstrations and counter-summits. Beware those who applaud failing strategies by masking their effects and embellishing their victories. We still assume that organizing amongst conscious revolutionaries is more effective, or implied to be easier, than others in our vicinities, consciously radical or not. How we spatially organize our resistance determines in part the degree to which we can sustain our projects. Bonds nourished amongst revolutionaries are useful for us in developing theoretical and practical skills, networks, and mutual trust. This is not our only aim. Bonds nourished by daily interactions amongst our class opens potentials that are not confined to a milieu. Expansive transformation ends when we do. The further we communicate, through words and deeds, the further our projects can transform possibilities into realities.

The only adventure is the one not yet taken. The past must remain there; the present must open up. More experimentation and imagination in projects rooted in daily life and localized proximity can open a world of possibility still left unexplored. Relationships are the basic unit of expansive revolutionary social transformation. As our relations transform and expand, the development of social bases will strengthen projects in both the short and long term. We have no interest in building false community. We want to project ourselves into autonomous communes and networks of solidarity. We want to live anarchy! The possibilities are everywhere and for everyone. It’ll take new directions of struggle to further this insurrection.

Let no revolutionary imagination extinguish itself in the footsteps of the past! There is a storm gathering ahead. We can feel it because we are it. Comrades, gather your strength and daring, revolution extends itself with you!

Solidarity to those in Denver and St. Paul! Their repression further incites the uncontrollability of our attack!

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