The site LaSolide.info took a break during the summer to focus on creating this bulletin. Inside, you will find news on comrades who face repression, a text explaining revolutionary solidarity, a series of recent solidarity action briefs and a stencil cut-out to reproduce!!! Printed in Montreal, October 2013.
Paper copies available at L’Insoumise, 1407 and La Belle Époque.
From Crimethinc
This is the final installment in our “After the Crest” series exploring how to navigate the waning phase of social movements. It is a personal reflection on anarchist participation in the 2012 student strike in Montréal and the disruptions that accompanied it. The product of much collective discussion, this article explores the opportunities anarchists missed during the high point of the conflict by limiting themselves to the framework of the strike, and the risks they incurred by attempting to maintain it once it had entered a reformist endgame.
For a narrative account of many of the events discussed in this text, read While the Iron Is Hot: Student Strike and Social Revolt in Montréal, Spring 2012.
February 13, 2012. After many months of ultimatums to the government, mobilization on university and cégep campuses, and occasional actions and demonstrations, the student strike officially begins with a few departments at Université Laval in Québec City. From there, it spreads rapidly. Spring has come early.
February 16. The student association of Cégep du Vieux Montréal votes to go on strike; the school is occupied. Late in the night, police enter the school and break up the occupation.
March 15. After weeks of escalating violence on the part of the police, including an incident in which a cégep student lost his eye to a concussion grenade, the COBP’s annual demonstration against police brutality begins at Berri Square; the crowd that gathers is significantly larger than at any other time in the history of the event, and a night riot ensues. Although many participants escape, over 226 are arrested.
March 22. The largest demonstration of the strike thus far is an ultimatum from the Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (CLASSE) to the Liberal government in Québec City: repeal your planned tuition hike, or we will begin a campaign of economic disruption. Although actions to this effect had already been taking place in Montréal, from this point on, they to begin to occur more frequently and with more ambitious objectives.
April 20. The Salon Plan Nord, a job fair, takes place at the Palais des congrès. Jean Charest is there to deliver a speech about his government’s plan for the accelerated development of Québec’s portion of the Labrador Peninsula—land which is still inhabited, for the most part, by indigenous people determined to live as sovereign, autonomous nations. The single largest street battle of the strike unfolds, paralyzing a large section of downtown for hours and capturing international headlines. For the first time in the strike, cops flee demonstrators. Its significance is immediately apparent to anarchists. Yet no one can predict how intense things will get.
May 4. A truce between the students and the government has come and gone. Angry night demonstrations have taken the streets, then been pacified; morning blockades of highways, skyscrapers, and other targets have ceased altogether. People have barely caught their breath from the largest anti-capitalist May Day demonstration in recent memory. And now buses from across the province are unloading militants of all sorts in the small town of Victoriaville; the goal is to disrupt the Liberal Party convention that was scheduled to take place at a Montréal hotel, then hastily transplanted to the countryside. The clash between demonstrators and the Sûreté du Québec police force is brutal; people on both sides are badly injured, but the red squares get the worst of it. Another person loses an eye; still another is put into a coma. Things don’t feel as good as they did two weeks prior.
May 10. The streets of Montréal have been peaceful for a few days, but this morning, smoke bombs go off in four métro stations across the city; the whole system is shut down for hours. Thanks to a good citizen with a cellphone, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) releases pictures of some suspects on its website the same day, and four people surrender at a police station soon thereafter.
May 18. Two new laws come into effect at midnight, both of which restrict the ability of participants in the strike movement to act. The night demonstrations turn confrontational again around this time, but despite heroic efforts against the police, the movement is unable to assert itself in the streets as effectively as it did a month earlier. That said, more people are participating than ever before. Spontaneous demonstrations begin in neighborhoods across Montréal, helping new neighborhood assemblies to take off.
June 7. The Canadian Grand Prix begins with a rich bastards’ gala. Militants fail to disrupt it, but over the next few days, despite a seriously compromised rapport de force with the police, they succeed in disrupting Montréal’s most important tourist event of the summer. Many inspiring things happen; yet it is clear that the movement is on the decline.
August 1. Confirming what people have suspected for weeks, the premier calls a general election for September 4. The Parti Québécois asks the movement to agree to an “electoral truce.”
August 13. Classes at some cégeps are scheduled to begin. School authorities, however, shut down classes so that anti-strike students can attend general assemblies on the matter of continuing the strike. Of the four cégeps voting on this matter, three vote to end the strike; they join schools that had voted similarly in the days prior. Except for a few departments at UQÀM, the strike collapses almost entirely over the next few weeks—though demonstrations continue, sometimes turning confrontational.
September 4. When the votes are counted, the PQ has won a majority in the National Assembly. The tuition hike is canceled by decree a few days later. Some call it victory.
Anarchists should hone our skills at anticipating social upheavals.[1]
Sometimes, such events can be seen coming far in advance, offering us the chance to prepare in order to surpass the limitations of the organizations, discourse, and default tactics that are likely to characterize them. That was the case in Montréal in the summer of 2011, by which time it was perfectly clear that a student strike was on the way. By the middle of summer, it was widely known that the major student federations, ASSÉ, FÉCQ, and FÉUQ, were collaborating for a massive demonstration on November 10. This demonstration was conceived as presenting the Liberal government with an ultimatum before the movement resorted to an unlimited general strike. Earlier in 2011, the occupation of the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, had taken me and many other anarchists across the continent by surprise. In Montréal, on the other hand, we had advance warning of things to come; it was clear to some of us that we could make strategic use of this knowledge.
A correct analysis of any situation, combined with reflection on one’s own objectives, should suggest a strategy with which to proceed.[2] But how do we refine our analytical skills? I don’t want to reduce this to experience; plenty of “veterans” analyze situations badly, routinely making the same mistakes. In Montréal, that camp includes those who fetishize direct democracy, certain types of collective process, and the global justice movement that peaked here in the mobilization against the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Québec City. Québécois insurrectionists tend to dismiss that crowd—perhaps too hastily—as being attached to a romanticized notion of anti-capitalist struggle in Montréal at the turn of the millennium. And yet older insurrectionists are also guilty of using the same tactics that they’ve been using for years, often with no better sense of the political context than the younger people they are lecturing.
Rather than deferring to age and experience, we can sharpen our analytical skills through discussion groups, general assemblies oriented towards communication as an end in itself, and more writing, theorizing, and critique. These are the processes that enable a crew, a community, or a distributed network of subversives to gain mutual understanding and refine their analyses in order to speak precisely about what is happening, what must be done, and—most importantly—how to do it. It is essential to find the time and space to do this with people you trust, whose analysis you also trust, and ideally who come from a range of backgrounds and experience.
This isn’t a recipe for success. The future can’t be foreseen with total accuracy. But things sometimes play out in similar ways over and over again. There are patterns we can identify. We have a better chance of finding them if many of us are looking, and even better if we disagree on some things and draw on different knowledge.
If anarchists don’t improve our ability to foresee events, we will keep repeating two grievous mistakes. First, we won’t know when it’s time for us to throw ourselves into a struggle with everything we’ve got—when the risks are worth the possible consequences. Alas, many anarchists in Montréal waited until far later than would have been ideal to get involved in the student strike. Second, we won’t recognize when we should withdraw because the movement is headed toward a catastrophe that will hurt us—as the events of August 2012 did, at the end of the strike.
Once the school year started, some anglophone anarchists from outside the university, or who were students but who mostly organized outside of student spaces, made a concerted effort to insert themselves and anarchist ideas in general into student organizing at McGill and Concordia. This was sometimes as sloppy and disorganized as the individual anarchists involved. But that didn’t matter; what mattered was consistency. Local anarchists’ distribution of certain texts at McGill, such as After the Fall and “Communiqué from an Absent Future,” probably contributed significantly to the occupations that occurred on McGill campus during the 2011–12 school year, both before the strike even started.
Many of the texts distributed were written in inaccessible insurrectionist jargon; anarchists often came off as total wingnuts. But the point was not to appeal to the masses. It was to make connections with specific people who would be participating in the strike when it began— a process that was developed further by inviting people to events at La Belle Époque, the newly-opened anarchist social center in the Southwest, or just by hanging out. This, in turn, encouraged those people to expand the discourse of the strike to other areas: struggle in defense of the Earth, against the police, against racism and colonialism, and so on.
Student militants at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and Cégep du Vieux Montréal had been organizing for much longer. These two schools, from which other strikes had historically emerged, were also the source of most of the momentum for the 2012 strike. Although both schools already had a strong radical presence, political graffiti within certain buildings was ramped up in the years before the strike. Occupations and demonstrations were organized. In early 2011, Hydro-Québec’s downtown headquarters was smoke-bombed by students from Vieux, forcing an evacuation. There was also a lot of work behind the scenes—distributing propaganda, organizing informative assemblies, and the like. Syndicalist anarchists participated actively in their student associations and in the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ); this meant office work, balancing finances, writing articles for ASSÉ’s newspaper Ultimatum or for individual associations’ broadsheets, and a lot of organizing limited by the discourse of the official student movement. Some anarchists have been critical of this approach, but there’s no question that anarchists on the whole benefited from the fact that some people were doing this.
Syndicalist methods created the strike; it could be argued that they also created the limitations that would ultimately produce the movement’s downfall. A point that is sometimes missed, however, is that every social upheaval will have built-in limitations, and there isn’t even a chance to overcome those limitations until the upheaval exists as a material reality. Despite the tensions that existed between various anti-capitalist and pro-strike factions at Cégep du Vieux and UQÀM, it is clear that the lowest-common-denominator mobilization approach of creating opposition to the tuition hike complemented direct action, if only by fostering a political environment in which other students could understand why “the issues” were serious enough that some people would take such action.
“Fuck fascists, therefore fuck the administration.”
Graffiti at Cégep du Vieux Montréal before the strike.
Crises create opportunities. This is perhaps the most important maxim for anyone who wants to defend land, freedom, and dignity against the ravages of capitalism. In this context, it is problematic that many anarchists, in the years before the strike, were willfully ignorant of the political machinations that produced the flashpoint of the strike. It took a long time for anarchists who had been following the developments to convince their comrades of the importance of the impending events.
Of course, given the right circumstances and skill sets, we can generate crises ourselves. This is exactly what some anarchists, upon finding themselves as students at institutions with a tradition of direct democracy and a history of strike-making, proceeded to do in the years leading up to 2012—just as other anarchists had done in the years leading up to 2005 and earlier strikes.
Anglophone anarchists in Montréal—many of whom grew up in other provinces or in the US, whose French is marginal at best, often possessed of rather few francophone friends, frequently either university dropouts or enrolled at schools with less interesting political cultures—were usually not as disposed to help produce a crisis. This was also true of older anarchists, those with jobs, or those on welfare and genuinely poor; in essence, non-student anarchists of all language backgrounds. But, though anarchists from certain social positions may not have been able to contribute as much to making the strike happen, there was plenty for those people to do to improve their capacity to participate in the strike once it began.
The most important thing is consistency—doing what you can from where you are. It doesn’t matter how limited your abilities or social position are. If you don’t drop the ball, you’ll eventually get a chance to shoot.
Though some prepared for the strike itself, few did anything to prepare for the situation that arose from it: the peak of opportunity.
There were two such periods, actually. One started on April 20, 2012, with the protests against the Plan Nord conference, during which it became clear that the police were temporarily outmatched, and lasted until May 4, when it degenerated into more brutal and less inspiring violence at the Liberal Party convention in Victoriaville. This was a period when so much could have been done, and yet many insurrecto-hooligans contented themselves with mere rioting—as exciting as that may have been. Soon enough, it was no longer fun. It wasn’t just random unfortunates with presumably little street experience who were getting arrested and injured, but ourselves and our friends as well. This is all the worse because almost anything could have happened in Montréal at that time if people had been able to step back from the whirlwind of events, gather their comrades, identify an objective, and act.
Friday, April 20 – inside the Palais des congrès.
Wednesday, April 25 – central downtown.
Tuesday, May 1 – central downtown.
Friday, May 4 – outskirts of Victo.
In point of fact, it seems this did happen, but perhaps too late. On May 10, the most effective sabotage of the Montréal métro to date took place, with smoke bombs going off at four different stations across the city. If such an act had occurred during a large demonstration or riot in downtown Montréal, it could have created an even more uncontrollable situation across the island—perhaps opening new windows of opportunity for anarchists and others to seize territory or go on the offensive. By May 10, however, an uneasy peace had taken hold in Québec with the pacification of the night demonstrations and the passing of the last spectacular clashes during daylight hours, May Day and the Battle of Victo. In this context, the smoke bombing incident appeared as a daring attempt to reignite conflict, not as a conscious effort to expand its scope at the height of things.
The period that started on April 20 was not a revolutionary moment, but perhaps only because no one proposed, via words or action, to take the logical step from mass vandalism to the collective expropriation of goods and seizure of buildings—the kind of activity that would have quickly brought out even larger crowds than were already participating in the strike. Things might have gotten a little nasty after that, no doubt, especially given the lengths to which the state is willing to go to uphold the institution of private property. But had things escalated to this point, the revolutionary potential of the situation would have become apparent to everyone.
There was a second peak of opportunity a few weeks later, and it too was squandered.
To be clear, the opportunities that this second peak presented were not produced by militants’ capacity to maintain a rapport de force with the police. On the nights immediately before and after the government passed its Special Law to crack down on the strike, there were major street battles that lasted long into the night, probably involving the largest numbers of any post-sundown street action and certainly producing the largest mass arrests. But while many experienced these clashes as inspiring, including many out-of-town anarchists who had shown up for the anarchist book fair, the battles proved ephemeral. They were the final and most spectacular clashes of a movement that was rapidly losing the capacity to go toe-to-toe with the police that it had gained in the early months of the strike, and particularly between March 22 and May 4.
New opportunities were produced, though, by the expansion of anti-government sentiment to parts of society that hadn’t previously been involved in the strike. Suddenly, there were small roving demonstrations in neighborhoods across the city and in cities across the province. A sizeable number of these people were said to have supported the tuition hike, but fundamentally objected to the government’s “anti-democratic” means of defending the capitalist economy and its monopoly on violence. The numbers also grew downtown; the demonstration on May 22 may have had as many as 400,000 people.
A demonstration in the neighborhood of Saint-Henri on Thursday, May 24.
This opened up a moment akin to the Occupy moment in other places.[3] What happened is that people with radically different ideas were meeting in the streets, vaguely united by their opposition to how things were going in their society. Perhaps they were excited by the energy of the moment; perhaps they were open to challenging preconceived notions about how things should be, and how to get there.
This didn’t happen on the scale that it could have. Many anarchists cited the shortcomings of the casserole demos and the neighborhood assemblies to justify not engaging with them. Of course, there were shortcomings; that’s to be expected whenever people more familiar with obedience to authority suddenly opt for defiance. Their strategies, rhetoric, analysis, and even attitudes weren’t always ideal from an ideologically purist anarchist perspective. But this was as true of those who fought in the streets—including those young and patriotic Québécois men who saw their combat with the police as a continuation of the FLQ’s hypermasculine methodology—as it was of those who opted to bang pots and pans or to participate in the “popular neighborhood assemblies” that had, in many cases, devolved after a few weeks into hangout spaces for all the local weirdos interested in radical politics.
A popular assembly in the Plateau on June 10.
The important thing here is that the confrontations of the book fair weekend marked the point when street fighting downtown started to deliver diminishing returns, in terms of its ability to disrupt the capitalist economy and improve the movement’s rapport de force with the government. At that point, it was probably more feasible to broaden the disturbances than to escalate the ones already taking place.
Both peaks of opportunity, starting on April 20 and May 18 respectively, involved peak numbers of people engaging in particular activities—either the specific activity of fighting the police during the first peak, or the general activity of participating in the strike movement during the second. These were our chance to reach out to all the people whose political analyses, experiences, or backgrounds were different from ours. Most of them knew what they were there to do. If anarchists had articulated to others a method of how to do it while also encouraging people to go farther, it’s possible that the movement could have reached still higher peaks.
The strike didn’t die over the course of the summer. It stagnated.
After the Grand Prix, the demonstrations and meetings continued—quite a lot, in fact, albeit less than during the spring. June 22 and July 22 saw tens of thousands of people come out; not a single night demonstration failed to take the streets. There was a bit of a ruckus in Burlington, Vermont, when premiers and governors in the northeastern part of the continent met there at the end of July. Plans were drawn up for a convergence for the rentrée (the return to classes and the recommencement of the suspended semester) in August, starting first at cégeps and then moving on to universities.
All of this happened, yet none of it materially improved the strike’s prospects for defending itself, particularly in the face of an election campaign—one of the most effective tactics democratic states have at their disposal to shut down social movements. It had been suspected for weeks, then essentially confirmed in the days immediately prior, but Jean Charest, the premier, made the official announcement on August 1.
Incidentally, August 1 also marked the hundredth night demonstration
in a row since April 24.
The Parti Québécois offered a deal to the movement: settle down a bit, we’ll win this election, and then we’ll suspend the hike. It was argued, not unreasonably, that disruptive activity could hurt the PQ’s chances of beating the incumbent Liberals. Consequently, pacifist vigilantes stepped up their efforts to interfere with confrontational tactics at the night demonstrations, and the cégeps unanimously voted against the continuation of the strike. The strike did continue in some departments at UQÀM, but the effect was marginal, and efforts to enforce a shutdown of classes were undermined by scabs, security, and police.
Anarchists had taken many risks and suffered severe consequences in their efforts to strengthen and embolden the movement as a whole. Many had already been beaten and arrested, and faced charges and uncertain futures. More than any other political tendency involved in the strike, anarchists were the ones who escalated the situation to the point that Jean Charest was forced to call an early election to end the crisis. Yet despite our best efforts, we had become foot soldiers for a movement that had always had a nationalist, social-democratic, and reformist character. Now this movement no longer needed us to win its unimaginative and ultimately shortsighted baseline objective: the cancellation of this specific tuition hike. It became difficult to avoid the conclusion that we had been used. Many of us felt, perhaps irrationally, that our efforts over the past few months had been utterly in vain. We told ourselves that we had gained experience, friends, and so on, that we had been part of something “historic,” but this sort of positive rhetoric failed to improve morale. In some cases, it just made things worse.
Since the strike’s end, many anarchists have argued that we failed to apply the right tactics to the situation. What could we have done differently? What would have produced a greater success for us in August?
But this line of critique may miss the mark. Perhaps we should step back and ask whether it was strategic for anarchists to try to revive the strike after militancy had withered over the summer. At the time, everyone embraced the “common sense” assumption that the top priority was to keep the strike alive. Hindsight is 20/20, but the negative consequences of that approach should have been predictable.
Maybe, instead, we should have just gotten out of there.
Now, I am not proposing that we should have withdrawn all support from the strike, but that we should have withdrawn some forms of support, especially the ones that involved considerable personal risk. Anarchists had previously proven capable of this. Many anarchists withdrew at the right time during the occupation of Cégep du Vieux Montréal and the night riot of March 15. In doing so, they left less experienced participants to face their fate alone—resulting in mass arrests in both cases. This was a little callous, no doubt; but during both events, anarchists made a point of offering advice to people who were making some pretty questionable decisions about how to conduct themselves. Anarchists eventually—and in my opinion, correctly—decided to take care of themselves once it was clear that things were about to get ugly and that their suggestions were falling on deaf ears. And in the aftermath, anarchists organized support for those arrested.
Regarding the strike as a whole, getting out wouldn’t mean, for example, anarchists suddenly abandoning their critical support of the idea of free education. A common denominator position among anarchists in Québec, from syndicalists to anti-civ nihilist types, is that Québec’s privileged proletariat deserves the nice things in life—like a useless liberal arts education—at least as much as Québec’s even more privileged ruling class. To say it differently: “If capitalism, then at least welfare capitalism.”
Making a strategic exit wouldn’t have stopped anarchists from intervening where it made sense to do so, either—but it would have meant that anarchists ceased helping the student movement whenever it stumbled, talking confidence into it whenever it hesitated, and trying to knock some sense into it whenever it was about to go in a stupid direction. In many ways, anarchists related to the student movement the way you might relate to a partner—in this case, an overly dependent partner who was not very appreciative of the help we often offered him unconditionally, sometimes was downright emotionally abusive, and really, do we even like this guy that much?
But anarchists often lack self-confidence. Sometimes we don’t know when it’s time to cut our losses and move on. We were under the impression that we needed the strike to go on in order to continue building up our own power. Yes, we had invested a lot in the movement, and it would have felt wrong just to pull out and let it do its own thing—which, no doubt, would have left us shaking our heads in exasperation. But was it really a good idea to invest even more in it when things were evidently headed in an ugly direction?
Our efforts to revive the movement did a lot to hurt the momentum that anarchists in Montréal had been building, in stops and starts, for years—since long before the strike. This set us up for disappointment and depression, needlessly demoralizing and demobilizing us. The problem was that we were pursuing a grossly unrealistic objective. The option of continuing the strike, especially given the general decline in confrontational activity during the early part of the summer, simply could not compete with the option of electoral compromise with the PQ. Democratic ideas have significantly greater sway in the student movement and among the general population than anarchist ideas. As unfortunate as this is, we should recognize this and act accordingly.
The worst thing about the decision to prioritize continuing the strike was that, at that point, there were plenty more interesting and worthwhile paths open. For example, we could have focused on resisting and counteracting state repression. Repression had affected anarchists the most severely, but it also affected revolutionaries from other tendencies—most significantly Maoists—as well as many people who had simply been caught up in the energy of the strike and received criminal charges as a result.
“The strike continues on August 13!” Many militants suffered from tunnel vision in August, doing what they could to prove this poster true— but at a heavy cost for other fronts of the struggle.
During the spring, anarchists organized some powerful noise demonstrations, and there were also actions at Montréal’s courthouse, the Palais de justice. After the strike was over, in fall 2012, a large and spirited demonstration took to the streets in solidarity with everyone facing charges, living with restrictive conditions, or otherwise suffering as a result of things they had been accused of doing during the strike. Various texts appeared on this topic, as well. Yet at the end of the summer, during the period of the election and the rentrée, there was no organizing to speak of on that front.
The only thing anarchists did collectively in August, besides attempting to stop the rentrée, was to campaign against representative democracy itself. This could have been a promising terrain of struggle, but almost everyone involved was also wrapped up in the losing battle of continuing the strike. Things didn’t turn out well on either front—but even more importantly, both undertakings were posited by the anarchists involved as being in solidarity with the student movement, when it was precisely the student movement that was facilitating the isolation and repression of anarchists by abandoning the strike.
In other words, the student movement was acting contrary to the principle of solidarity. And by buying into the PQ’s proposal for an “electoral” truce, the student movement sabotaged its own most basic objective, with the PQ ultimately implementing indexation rather than a true tuition freeze.
As a side point, it’s both facile and inaccurate to blame movement leaders and politicians for this turn of events. The strike was voted down in directly democratic assemblies. No matter how loud and influential certain individuals were, it was the students as a whole who chose to abandon the strike.
The hopeless attempt to save the student movement from itself took away from the effectiveness of anarchists’ anti-democratic campaign. It was basically the same people doing everything, and they didn’t have the energy to do everything; their energies were split between appealing to students to keep the strike going, and appealing to society at large not to vote.
“The elections… We don’t give a fuck! We don’t vote; we struggle.”
Anarchists saw these as identical, which was a poor understanding of the social reality. For one thing, there was the statist, reformist, pro-voting stance of the majority of the student movement’s participants—but do we really need to beat that particular dead horse any longer?
Meanwhile, a lot of people living in Montréal have a difficult time simply surviving because of the neighborhood they live in, the color of their skin, their lack of citizenship or status, or their accent in French—if they can speak it at all. There’s no doubt that plenty of marginalized folks were down with at least certain aspects of the student movement. But neither is there any doubt that most of them had only limited interest in the self-centered struggle of a bunch of privileged brats who, broadly speaking, did not reciprocate by concerning themselves with the more dire struggles of migrants, indigenous people, and others.[4]
Now, I’m not saying you need to take off your red square if you want to start talking to such people about the moral bankruptcy of democracy. But maybe the fact that the PQ is going to sell out the movement shouldn’t be the center of your analysis if you want to address people who aren’t particularly invested in the movement. All the adamant social democrats to whom anarchists’ analysis of the situation might have been useful—given that they were legitimately seeking a freeze, not indexation—were completely unwilling to listen to anarchists during election time. That was their mistake. But our mistake was to keep trying to get through to the social democrats rather than reaching out to others who might have been a little more open had we been less alienating.
It’s hard to imagine that the results could have been worse than what actually happened if, instead of trying to engage students and other participants or supporters of the movement with anti-electoral ideas, anarchists had used the same time and energy to advance a critique of Québécois democracy by other means. Sure, I’m skeptical that dropping a banner emblazoned with the words NEVER VOTE! NEVER SURRENDER! À BAS LA SOCIÉTÉ-PRISON «DÉMOCRATIQUE!» from a train bridge in a neighborhood full of francophone pensioners, then failing to publicize that this even happened, is the best use of anyone’s time. But as confusing, poorly contextualized, and silly as that might be, at least it speaks for itself without centralizing the students’ struggle to preserve their privileged position in society.
It’s interesting to think about what other projects anarchists could have undertaken, unencumbered by the student movement. What if anarchists, in neighborhood assemblies or more informally, had pushed a struggle against gentrification and manifestations of capitalism in the areas where we actually live, while police resources were tied up watching night demonstrations and maintaining order downtown? In other words—what if we had taken advantage of the political situation to improve our own long-term material position, rather than improving the rapport de force between the government and the students?
We also could have done more to usurp the megaphone, both literally and figuratively. This happened earlier in the strike: on the night of March 7, after a demonstrator lost his eye to an SPVM grenade, anarchists shouted down a few self-appointed leaders’ appeals for people to express their outrage peacefully, successfully convincing the majority of the crowd to stop standing around in Berri Square and either physically confront the police or at least defy their commands to disperse. There were attacks on two different police stations that night, the first such actions of the strike.
In August, as on March 7, there were crowds of outraged people, but this time, they weren’t outraged about police violence. Instead, as an outvoted minority, they were upset by their fellow students’ decision to abandon the strike. The situation was a bit different: to go the fighting route would have meant ignoring the final verdict of a directly democratic vote, not just a few people with megaphones. In retrospect, it’s not clear how many people would ever have been willing to do that, given that the authority of such a vote is almost universally accepted in the galaxy of Québécois student politics. But alas, it seems that, in the aftermath of those disastrous student assemblies, there was no one even able to bring up the idea to the hardly insignificant number of militants (student and otherwise) suddenly bereft of previous months’ democratic justification for continuing the fight.
Pursuing a hard line against nationalists and their discourse would also have divided and weakened the movement, but it would have publicized anarchists’ position on the Parti Québécois in clear terms. It would have offered an opportunity to call out their racist Muslim baiting in pursuit of the xenophobe vote, and their noxious valorization of French colonization on this continent. Had harsh critiques of CLASSE and/or ASSÉ come out when the strike was still in motion, rather than months later, this would also have divided the movement, albeit instructively. But if the movement is going to lose anyway, why not divide it?
It was clear after a certain point in August, if not earlier, that things were rapidly coming to a close. This was an inevitable result of the efforts of nationalists, social democrats, and others who had always been pursuing a conflicting agenda. Revolutionary struggle can be an ugly business, and there are times when it makes sense for us to hold our noses and work with people whose politics we consider objectionable. We should never attack or alienate those we dislike for no good reason. But, at the end of the strike, the benefits of making an open break were clear.
This is particularly important in light of the student movement’s unforgivable failure to support those who were facing judicially imposed conditions including exile from the Island of Montréal, non-association with friends or lovers, and the possibility of serious jail time in the future. It doesn’t matter whether the accused did what the state charged them with; the point is that illegal activity was essential to whatever success the strike had, and letting anyone suffer because the state pinned some of that activity on them sets a bad precedent for strikes to come. That’s the strategic argument, anyway—the ethical one should be obvious.
“The laws of the state and the batons of the police will not stop our revolt. Solidarity with those who face repression for their participation in the struggle!” This poster was wheatpasted widely in certain neighborhoods after the strike was over.
In short, anarchists could have done many things other than what we did do, which was to stay at the core of the movement. It was already clear by the weekend of the Grand Prix that the movement was on its way out; the events of June and July (or the lack thereof) confirmed this. Yet anarchists continued participating in general assemblies and committee meetings; to be precise, anarchists either returned to those spaces after having left them, or came to them for the very first time during the whole strike. This was done out of a mistaken belief that it was necessary to do so, that the struggle depended on the revival of the strike.
The end of the strike was marked by a pronounced failure to address the widespread phenomenon of post-strike depression. We might better identify this as post-uprising depression, common anywhere that has experienced sustained periods of social rupture.
Many windows opened during the strike, but now we find ourselves “between strikes,” as some people say here, which is to say in a period of demobilization. Compared to the spring of 2012, it feels unusually difficult to pull off even the simplest things.
Depression is an understandable but unfortunate response to the end of the strike. It’s useless, and a little cruel, to tell people that they shouldn’t feel sad about something that is an objectively depressing turn of events from an anarchist adventurist’s standpoint. Like any period of social rupture, the strike offered an exciting and dangerous context, presenting challenges to anyone caught up in it. To be sure, not everyone wants excitement, danger, or inconvenience. Many people would prefer to drive down rue Sainte-Catherine without worrying about giant demonstrations, or go to school without running into hard pickets, or take the métro without fear of a smoke bomb attack or bags of bricks on the rails. In contrast, the kind of person who’s going to become—and remain—an active, attack-oriented anarchist probably thrives on that sort of thing.
This is adventurism: the sin of actually enjoying the struggles we participate in. We may not all like the same things, or be capable of the same types of action, but our common thread—regardless of divergent physical ability, tactical preferences, skill sets, resources, and social privileges—is that we are fighters. The restoration of social peace deprives us of something we need. This peace is an illusion, and the social war continues, but it’s harder to position ourselves offensively when it’s no longer playing out in the streets every day and night—when thousands of people no longer see themselves as participants, having returned to the old routines of work or school or skid life.
There are lots of different ways to cope with depression. Hedonism is one way; after the strike ended, there was a heavy turn in some circles towards alcohol consumption, drug use, and hardcore partying. Another way is to switch gears entirely: some left town or put all of their energy into single-issue organizing, while others threw themselves back into school or art or earning money. Some of these means of coping were healthier than others. But as a whole, they all contributed to isolating people from one another and atomizing the struggle.
It was worse for the sizeable number of anarchists who stuck it out longer, trying to do exactly what they had been doing a few months earlier: going to demonstrations, mobilizing people for them, trying to hype people up and “make things happen.” After the electoral victory of the PQ, this simply didn’t work anymore. The problem wasn’t just that many anarchists had quit the strike by that time (although that certainly did have an impact). The problem was that anarchists in Montréal didn’t quit collectively. Instead, we quit one at a time, and often only once we had reached a maximum of exhaustion, a low of misery, or both.
Of course, it’s a stretch to speak of anarchists in Montréal doing anything in a coordinated way. There are simply too many organizations, nodes, social scenes, and affinity groups—each of which has its own distinct goals, outlook, and capacity. But none of these groups withdrew explicitly from the strike. Formal anarchist organizations in the city, except for a few propaganda outfits into heavy theory, had never fully engaged themselves in the strike as organizations.[5] It was individuals, usually working with others on the basis of friendship, who made the decision whether to drop out. The informal associations of people who worked closely together during the strike never met to discuss what people could do together as the strike was winding down. Consequently, these associations mostly evaporated with the strike.
There were many intentional discussions in June and July, announced ahead of time through social media and listservs, but most of these were focused on “the tasks at hand”—blocking the upcoming rentrée and continuing the strike. In my own circles, there was never time or space to talk about how people felt about the situation as a whole, how they felt about their own personal situations, or what they hoped to get out of continuing to engage with the strike. Nor were there many discussions between people who felt political affinity with one another, or who cared about maintaining positive relationships with one another more than they cared about abstract political objectives.
During the spring, we shared some incredible moments together. We flipped over police cars, partied in the streets, forced cops to run for their lives, painted the halls of university buildings according to our tastes, made out with strangers during street parties that became riots, and generally lived life to the fullest. It wasn’t all good, but the parts that were good were really good. Over the summer, like many other people, I made the mistake of attributing all that to the strike, rather than to the specific people who were in the streets acting to create those moments. The strike created the context in which those people were able to act together: it brought large numbers into the streets, it facilitated us running into each other over and over again, it frustrated and overwhelmed the forces that defend the capitalist economy.
But the strike had no agency of its own. It was itself the product of human agency—and by no means only the agency of anarchists. Although we were an influential minority in some regards, such as determining how confrontational the demonstrations were, we were not actually that important. Another influential minority consisted of careerist student politicians who were able to influence other aspects of the strike, like which images and narratives of the strike were broadcast on television and blogspace, much more effectively than we could.
Anarchists needn’t have been depressed by the end of the strike. This isn’t a macho admonishment that people shouldn’t let their feelings get the best of them; I don’t think the answer is for us to become coldly rational revolutionaries who move in a Terminator-like linear fashion towards our objectives. We are emotional creatures, and that is for the best. My criticism is that we staked our morale, our passion to fight, on the wrong thing: not on the health of the relationships of people seeking to be dangerous together, but on the health of the strike as a force that could interrupt capitalist law and order—which many of the people who created the strike never saw as a goal in itself, but only as a temporary means to a reformist goal.
As the strike was winding down, I should have dedicated more time to making connections with all those potential friends. There was one demonstration in August that I knew would be boring, but I went anyway. I saw someone there I’d seen a dozen times since February. He recognized me, too, and made a reference to the sort of thing we should have been doing. I laughed, but I didn’t keep talking—even though that was the last chance I’d see him. I should have introduced myself, tried to exchange contact information, and passed on an invitation to get together at La Belle Époque. It was my last chance to do that.
As for the people with whom I was closest during the strike—partners in the street, fellow writers of timely propaganda, and other co-conspirators—these were the people with whom I should have been discussing what would come after the strike. What did our experiences together during those months mean? As the larger movement fell apart, could that history of working together transform into something else?
But relationships between specific people were not prioritized at the end of the strike. Instead, we prioritized relationships to masses—which, it turns out, are much more easily seduced by politicians than by people like us.
It took a few months after the election for things to pick up again—but they did. Struggle in Montréal can cycle quickly from highs to lows and back again. February of 2013 saw demonstrations first against the Salon des Ressources Naturelles, a reprise of the previous year’s Salon Plan Nord, then a major mobilization to oppose the PQ’s Summit on Higher Education, at which the new governing party confirmed that, rather than freezing tuition, they would index it to inflation and the cost of living. This was not a broken promise on their part; it had been part of their election platform.
SPVM forces move south along rue Berri on February 26, 2013.
Banner drop, March 5, 2013: “We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison.”
Banner leading the march, March 5, 2013: “The social peace is behind us.”
The next month started off promisingly, with the night demonstration on Tuesday, March 5, getting a little rowdy near the Palais des congrès. Yet that was the end of this second cycle. On March 12, another night demonstration—albeit much smaller—was crushed before it even left Berri Square. On March 15, the SPVM, with the assistance of the SQ, crushed Montréal’s annual anti-police demonstration decisively. From that point on, all but one of the unpermitted demonstrations[6] that marched through downtown during the spring of 2013 were kettled and dispersed before they could become disruptive.
The police attacked the COBP demonstration on March 15, 2013 before the march was even scheduled to begin.
On the municipal, the provincial, and the federal level, the state has taken measures to prevent any reprise of spring 2012, passing laws to restrict or criminalize the essential elements of militant protest. The most ominous of these measures is Bill C–309, which finally became law on June 19, 2013. Applicable across the entire territory of the Canadian federation, it gives courts the ability to issue a prison sentence of up to ten years if a person is convicted of wearing a mask in the course of criminal activity during a demonstration. The simple fact of being present in an illegal demonstration can be considered criminal in itself.
Of course, actual police tactics are ultimately more important than codes and ordinances. The SPVM have evidently taken time to analyze the events of last spring, identifying their errors, drawing lessons, updating their old techniques, learning new ones, upgrading their equipment, and training officers. The results are plain to see.
In Québécois student politics, the reformist federations FÉUQ and FÉCQ have seen their influence reduced significantly, whereas the more radical ASSÉ (the kernel around which the now defunct CLASSE was formed) has more student associations affiliated with it than ever before. This is good for us, if only because ASSÉ’s direct democracy creates spaces in which it is harder to shut people up—and anarchists are precisely the kind of people that social-democratic politicos usually want to silence.
At the same time, ASSÉ is now disorganized and largely dysfunctional. The members who possessed revolutionary aspirations and the strategic ideas to match have largely abandoned the organization. There is good reason to think that, just as after the 2005 strike, it will take years before the organization is once again capable of mounting an effective challenge to the government. Whether or not anarchists choose to participate in that struggle (and some surely will, even if others don’t), it shouldn’t be taken for granted that the next social major upheaval in Québec will arise from the student movement.
Indeed, in the wake of 2012’s uprising, we should reconsider the strategies that have worked for us in the past. This is certainly true for all those who, in one way or another, sought to defend “the Québec model” over the course of the strike: the most significant student strike in Québec’s history, by just about any measure, didn’t even realize its most basic demand. For anarchists fighting in this province—and anyone else who would willfully jeopardize the comforts of welfare capitalism for half a chance at revolution and real freedom—it is incumbent upon us to determine how we should proceed towards our objectives, or live our politics, or both, in what is now a very uncertain political environment.
I will conclude with just a few concrete suggestions. First off, however we pursue our struggles in the future, we should strive to build more infrastructure, more formal communications networks, and more informal social networks that are autonomous of movements comprised largely of people with whom we have serious political differences. Doing this could make it possible that, the next time a large portion of society is drawn into the streets, we will be able to participate in the conflict without losing sight of our own values, building momentum that is not dependent on someone else’s movement.
Once we have infrastructure and networks of our own, as many anarchists in Montréal already do, we should be sure to use them. The thing that distinguishes revolutionary infrastructure from subcultural infrastructure—that is, an anarchist social center from a DIY punk space—is that, alongside its role as another space to live, socialize, and make ends meet, it should also serve to encourage people to throw themselves into anarchist struggle, and to spread the skills necessary for that task.
The latter first.
There are many practical skills that some anarchists already have, and others need to learn: digital self-defense, trauma support, tactics for street action, proficiency in different languages, and so on. These are all useful for specific situations—but we also need to be prepared for general situations. We need to be able to recognize when momentum is picking up, when we are at a peak of opportunity, when things are slowly or rapidly coming to a halt, and what is strategic for anarchists to do in each of these situations. Studying history, not just because it is curious or inspiring but in order to identify patterns and apply lessons, is essential if we hope to orient ourselves in the trajectory of the next upheaval to come.
Finally, the next time we realize that total anarchist triumph is no longer in the cards, we should consider the advantages of going out with a bang.
Beginnings
I.
Anarchist ideas are not dead things, to be viewed as a logical conclusion of certain ideas of justice, equality or “humanity.” There is no logical series, no precise and irrefutable argument that must convince a rational person. It is a certain relation to power, a certain disgust at authority and its pretensions, a certain sensitivity to the coercions of daily life that inform and inspire these explorations. That to a degree one must want to be anarchist, look toward revolt, have a desire to act and a feel for the immediate, a will for domination to not merely be resented but actively opposed—toward an eradication of guilt and other emotional forms of social control. That without these inclinations no logic would suffice to convince anybody, and that even if it did, enough belief in certain abstract ideas remains nothing but abstract as long as one does not engage with those other ideas through all parts of her awareness, in every aspect of her life, in defiance of the fear that is the final wall protecting society from all our passions, all our charged will.
II.
This text aims to fit in a space between constantly evolving ideas and active anarchist struggle—a thing long suffocating in North America. To counter the accumulation of books on disparate struggles and political events without a critical eye to their relevance, often becoming one more relic in a bottomless pit of information. I propose the diffusion of anarchist ideas for that end specifically, anarchist theory as a tool continuously honed, sharpened, experimented with, shaped by and for people thinking and struggling right now, for the context in which we exist.
Too often anarchism appears an old idea from the early days of industry, a thing we dust off and try to reckon with today. This may mean an anachronistic reviving of outdated analysis, or a superficial interpretation of anarchist practice applied to myriad isolated struggles. To a point, it doesn’t matter where good ideas come from. Yet it makes one wonder, that so much of the explicitly anarchist analysis of recent decades comes to us from Italy.
Revolt is not a linear process, beginning in the development of ideas and proceeding to acts, with the occasional symbolic return to old ideas. An idea is like a gun. You cannot stick it on a shelf for a hundred years to collect dust, occasionally going in the closet to peer at it from the door, all the while using various other tools in your daily life until the day comes to go armed. Surprise! The gun will not shoot.
Ideas require constant upkeep. They must be oiled, cleaned, played with, taken outside, loaded, tested. They ought to be somehow practiced or used in our daily lives, not something kept away for one day, later, nor to be stored in a closed room only for leisure purposes. Let us dismantle the lazy approach to anarchist theory in which one states merely “I like Goldman, but not Bakunin” or where one determines in advance to like primitivist writers and hate communist ones, or vice versa, without actually reading (really reading), without treating ideas as things alive.
I wish for anarchist writings that span the entire space between ideas and action, that ruthlessly address every form of coercion, see our society from all angles, analyze and critique two-dimensional dogmas, and explore new forms and ideas relevant to anti-state conflict. An anarchist theory that is integrally part of practices of today, with no contented affirmations of the status quo (of rebellion), that generates reflection, debate and discussion, that contributes to the living continuum of anarchist struggle in ideas and practice.
III.
Anarchists often trip on the question of what comes after: the insurrection, the revolution, a moment of break with all structures of domination. Many bicker and fight, drawing lines in sand, sharpening spears to defend different models of self-organized society, different conceptions of freedom. Others say that such visions are so far off, that the opportunity to shape our lives and communities are so distant that it is useless to even think of such matters. It is a more realistic, more constructive approach I think—doing away with hypothetical discussions that we may never have to hold practically, immediately, in relation to our lives. And yet, something else still lies hidden from the whole debate.
I cannot even imagine freedom, never having tasted it, beyond the illusions captured in moments of escape, in parties or drugs, wanderings in the desert, staring at the stars, losing one’s inhibitions in hours of intense conversation until the hum of the outside disappears into silence. I say illusions not because moments of escape are inherently useless, but because the sense of freedom resulting is an invention, derived from wanting more. In this sense memories are little different from hallucinations: a moment past is no longer tangible, possesses no more weight in the world. We can remember perceptions and emotions from specific moments, but this is little different from remembering such aspects from dreams. The only way past events become tangible is through the inspiration they invoke in the present, to seek after and surpass what has already been done. It is little different from acting upon a dream, or an idea, a thing read or heard speak of. We are drawn to certain ideas through our hatred of domination, of privilege and oppression, of work, property and police. Yet anarchy is not only the negation of such things: it is something else. But what?
IV.
As a child, sometimes I cried and lay awake for hours at night, contemplating with dread the idea of heaven, of living forever. I could not explain why better now than I could then. It was not a choice, or a consequence of outside influence. It is not that I preferred hell, nor even oblivion, to simply disappear after death. None of these appealed to me particularly, but the reason my mind lingered so long on heaven is because that is where I thought I should go, where I would expect to go if I was good. There would be no end to my questions: what is it like in heaven? Is it really forever? Do we get any breaks? Do we come back to earth sometimes?
The best explanation I can attempt to give is an emotional one. Deeply contentious feelings at the thought of living forever, but more importantly, a choking anxiety at the uncertainty of it, at committing myself to go somewhere when I couldn’t know what it would be like, when it was already set up, and I would have no control over it myself. I can put words to it now, but at the time it was very much indescribable.
This may sound foolish, but to me it goes a long way to explain why I am an anarchist today. It is not a reaction to specific events or forms of oppression, nor a consequence of being radicalized through disillusionment in activist projects. Those things play a part in the how I have become what I am, but the why was already there. I was six years old when I first remember these episodes of anxiety and insomnia, before encountering most figureheads and forms of domination that I now have names for. The simple fact of being born into a world that I have no say over, with a million mechanisms of coercion to ensure the smooth functioning of its parts—a world pre-determined from birth to death, with plans already in place for us after death. Or to one who is unexposed to religion, there is no formula after death, but the thought of slipping into nothing offers little, unless viewed as a soothing end to a hateful world, or as an acceptable resolution to a life well-lived. One of these involves giving up on life, and the other a willing acceptance of life for what it is—and neither assumption is truly satisfying by itself. So the emphasis falls back into this world, the immediacy of our lives.
V.
All the pieces are in place. It is quite clear and hard to miss. That we have little choice in how to live our lives, that certain paths are plotted for us from the beginning, that the “choice” of jobs, occupations, and commercialized hobbies is little more than the choice of products on supermarket shelves, that these options are whittled down further and further through various angles of exploitation, that suppression of one’s will, desires and unique ideas is the only socially acceptable way to move forward when placed in subordinate roles, that “self-advancement” is a glorified mixture of method acting and manipulation, and that a thousand curtains exist to obscure these material functions of society from us—and often fail hopelessly. It is not necessary to read anarchist theory, or Capital, or even first-person accounts of exploitation in its myriad forms to understand this. Perhaps some are blissfully unaware, and others use unawareness as a façade to mask their complicity, or simply to override any doubts that might slow them down in profiting from this society—but many of us are quite aware of it, and more often then not, running away from that awareness in movies, books, drugs, partying, sex and other diversions.
Yet even as our climate suffocates rebellion, it is not necessary to make distinctions between acting now and preparing for future eruptions, between sabotage and building links of solidarity, between coordinated resistance and affinity-based actions, between interacting the way we want to now and articulating offensive modes against what represses us, between an analysis of dominant power structures and one of everyday life. All of these things fit together into an anarchist practice in our immediate realities. We need no illusions such as building a revolutionary commune today to justify mutual aid between comrades and collectives; no myths such as a peaceful evolution toward a society based on liberty to justify creating the relationships and modes of expression that we thirst for now; no fairy tales like bankrupting capitalism through financial damage to justify attacks on property, expropriations, occupations and other disturbances of the social order. Onward! To the crushing of all illusions, as the merry march to revolution hides no pots of gold, and the only gifts and cached arms on the way are the future products of hands that refuse the arthritis of thoughtless repetition.
On choice, decision and will
Throughout our lives we are bombarded with series of choices, one after another. To go to high school or tech school, what path or specialization to follow, to work or study, stay home, travel or move. The spectacle of choice spans from the smallest scale to the largest: what toothbrush to buy, what to make for dinner, which type of rice, which brand of sliced bread, what party to go to, who to vote for, to have kids or not, to cheat or not, up to the narrow range of named sexual orientations, political identities, religions—the alleged big questions which define our lives, or so we are led to believe.
Not infrequently, we breathe a sigh of relief when presented with the most banal of options—yes or no, spicy or mild, this color or that color. As if to say, finally! Nobody is making us think so much, turning the most insignificant question into a philosophical inquisition. And it is thus that sometimes having no choice at all, the fact of somebody else making a decision for us, can grant a feeling of liberation. For the at-times agonizing process of reflection that precedes a choice; but also for the feeling of responsibility washing off, the anticipation of guilt gone. I don’t think it entirely exaggerated to say that this is a major contributor to the allure of fascism.
It is an interesting process. Society grants us free will, in a manner of speaking. It says, go forth—you can do whatever you want, be who you want to be, buy what you want to buy, eat what you want to eat. It backs this up by reel after reel of choices seemingly in every aspect of existence. At a certain point, one is tired of choices, overwhelmed by this spectacular personal liberty, longing for obligation, wishing to act without thinking, dreaming of orders to follow. So we crash in front of the TV, or go to bars, restaurants, cinemas, clubs, and other harems of entertainment, seeking a kind of amnesia.
Yet the greater picture comes not in asking in which contexts we have choices, what choices we have, and where these different choices might lead. The bigger questions are in what context these choices arise, which choices are available and which not, and where, or who, choices come from. The spectacle of choice comes always in the garb of legitimacy, or law and authority. It is only one with authority who is in a position to offer choices. Imagine a child asking her parents what they would like for dinner, or which fast food joint they wish to stop at on the road. It strikes me as strange, this reversal of roles, of who is asking the questions. Of course, this is an example in which one person is clearly providing the choice for another—how it often is in simple and direct power relations, on the scale of one person to another. However, in society at large, power relations are often much more complex, indirect and obscure, lacking for a single individual to which one may attribute authority in a given situation. Categories of self-definition, like good or bad, rich or poor, married or single, straight or gay, seem to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. There is no person, no institution that presents these questions to us. They are absorbed throughout our lives from countless different sources—school, family, media, work. And these ideas, these dynamics spread like rumors through friendship networks, social media, and all other informal and seemingly less authoritarian social settings, until they produce an atmosphere that is inescapable. In other words, socialization, from the perspective of choice.
And in this whole equation, individual will appears only as a shadow, just tangible enough that we don’t doubt its existence.
We see the same dynamic play out in radical milieus, in the production of revolutionary ideologies. One chooses to be a socialist, communist, or anarchist, in much the same way as one chooses to be a social democrat, a Republican, a Golden Dawn member. One finds the ideology that most closely approximates her own inclinations, the dogma closest to her own views, the social group that feels most appropriate. One chooses to be a syndicalist or a primitivist, to involve herself in Earth First!, the IWW or ABC through a similar process. And like in most choices, it feels more like a compromise than a thing entirely willed, as a desire that one must convince herself she possesses. And when various sub-ideologies are critiqued, it is usually from the view of what they lack, toward the creation of a new tendency that more closely approaches one’s own perspective, one’s own desires.
In this way we construct ever more barriers between what we really want, what we really feel, and an unimpeded chase after these.
Are we fearful? Perhaps because the will is fickle, because if one doesn’t have the label “anarchist” to hold onto, she may suddenly believe in capital, want a society of laws and police? Yet such are meaningful questions, to know when ideas are true expressions of a person, andwhen they are shields to hide behind. At the same time, one may resent the prevalence of differing wills in the world, of the active desire for money, luxury and security—that most people are not driven by an antipathy to domination, and that wills are harder to combat than ideologies and political groupings. After all, a person who chooses to be communist might well be convinced of anarchism. It is on these grounds that it is easiest, perhaps even most effective to build an anarchist struggle—or so it would seem. Yet what significance could this struggle have, if it relies on the same political forms that it wishes to destroy, or claims to?
It is with great pain that society ever allows us to really want, to possess a will in this world. And it is always too fleeting, rapidly channeled into some existing form in which desire becomes a “preference,” and will is something criminal. It is a thing we approach with careful steps, not knowing what to expect, fearful to awaken a dragon. Yet this strange act, fraught with danger and risk, is what distinguishes our task from that of political groups of all forms and perspectives.
The Marxist develops a party for revolution, because the transformation she wishes demands a certain medium to direct the masses into that path; and because regardless of the means, the ends sought, the type of society to be produced—require a certain medium, a certain mold to create the desired form. The famous notion of breaking eggs to produce an omelette can be read in a different light. Not the tragic sacrifice of a few lives in order to produce a society good for all who remain, but the demolition of deviant wills, the sacrificing of what is unique, passionate and ever wanting more, in favor of a smooth, sculpted society. “Making revolution” by this means could be easily rephrased as making capital, making school, or making social control anew.
In contrast, the anarchist vision requires no medium to create or maintain it. In fact, there is no anarchist vision, only a gleeful constellation of possibilities—to filter these through a single medium would inevitably destroy them. As an anarchist world can have no medium, an anarchist rebellion cannot pass through a single means, a mediated form. It must either burst the bounds of any organized frame, or be destroyed by the form through which it is organized. This is not to say there cannot exist organizations, strategies, popular forms of attack, common analyses, histories, and tendencies based in method and affinity—but we cannot mistake the thing itself for the complex of relations that encircle it. There is no shortcut to the unhindered exploration of ourselves, our affinities, our wants, and the development of unflinching wills against the full assault that we call society—with all its choices, benefits, and mystifications.
On desertion
Desertion has gained a lot of steam in certain anarchist circles in recent years. A disillusionment with already-practiced forms of organization and agitation, the actions that lead nowhere, the efforts at counter-info that rarely yield discernable results—alienation in the city, in social norms, and the mounting weight of committing to an anti-political project that is at once daunting, frightening, and without any solid basis for hope. All are reasonable ideas, yet they must be taken into a context, into a direction that maintains conflict with the state and capital, and not merely a back-to-the-land resurgence with anarchist bells and whistles. I have seen a great deal, individuals with a fierce hatred of civilization, retreating to the woods. The operative term here is not “the woods,” but retreating, as neither struggle nor desertion may be defined in terms of population density. The reasons I can imagine for this step are: a dearth of hope in any meaningful action, a hedonistic abandon of a broader anarchist project, and a faith in impending collapse of industrial society.
There is a more fantastic alternate explanation, in which one deserts, and fights from the fringes of society. Yet this cartoonish scheme imagines a land with unmapped frontiers, spaces where authorities venture cautiously, where one can disappear into the wilderness. In few places now could one still live self-sufficiently on land, go armed, and move into guerrilla warfare against agents of development. And where this is possible, the possibilities of repression are equally unrestrained. Particularly in North America, the state is far too present to permit such lawlessness.
To follow, two major questions must be asked. For one, what is it we wish to desert, and what can we desert, specifically? Secondly, to the degree it is possible, in what context does desertion make sense as a strategy—for self-preservation, attack, or both and other reasons? In an army, deserting makes sense when you can get away, hide, find comrades to protect you, change your appearance and identity, and depending on your intentions, find materials and comrades to strike back, to disrupt their operations, to create space for more defectors to escape, revolt, frag.
To the first question, one must be very careful to avoid falling prey to various traps and diversions. It cannot be precisely the city, the electrical grid, the use of automobiles, or one’s “dependence” upon capital, technology and social infrastructure that she wishes to escape, if we still place any interest in opposition. As far as capital penetrates the entire space of the globe, and its domination is far more complex than simple consumer dependence, the notion of material independence from infrastructure diverts active struggle into an illusion of coexistence. Modern capitalism is unique as a social-economic-technological system in its ability to consume all, its openness toward many different ideals, even “radical” ones, even autonomy and independence, so long as one forgets that autonomy is impossible in capitalist society.
So what can we desert? Old practices, habits, forms of organization that serve only to reproduce a spectacle of opposition, that lend weight to the illusion of choice, power and liberty, that hold up the dead weight of reforms as concrete steps in a revolutionary project. The empty ideas of progress and victory, the self-congratulatory response when the state throws back a few dollars to appease the special-interest group of the day. The idea that structures of power and domination will ever dissipate gradually, that revolutionary ends can be achieved without a backlash of bullets, prisons, shackles, and more and more, technological invasions to repress any attempt at liberty that refuses to confine itself to the world of ideas, dreams and literature.
What has always distinguished anarchist ideas from other revolutionary tendencies is the immediacy of the desire to revolt, recognizing the omnipresence of domination and the alienation that is produced even in so-called radical and revolutionary organizations. That we want relations without measure, a dissolving of coercion in all forms, space liberated from the incursions of the law—that we want these all right now, that waiting is slow suicide, that hope is a shot of poison, that it is our own actions and convictions, our wants and affinities, that in any way take us down a path toward liberation. That all these things combine toward a fullness in the anarchist’s life, that no one element is enough by itself, that all together make up an anarchist practice in ideas, relations, spaces, attacks and interventions. Also, that there is no lawful escape from the hands of the state within this context, that it is only through evasion, self-protection, invisibility and solidarity that we stay free to continue our joyous revolt against this world.
Hence, the point here is not to contrast desertion from active revolt. Rather, that desertion must be seen as a single method, a certain unfolding of desire, which has a place within the at-once individual and communal project of liberation, but cannot be seen as a general strategy. The greatest danger is in a certain dialectic of industrial collapse—one which overstates the irrelevance of social organizing, the mounting frequency of crises, and the inevitability of ecological and economic collapse. The given answer? Give up hope, give up organizing, give up on revolutionary ideas because the chart is set and in motion; all that is left is to get away, find a patch of woods or fields and prepare oneself for the mythical “after.”
They make a good case, but this is the deceit inherent in any dialectic, be it one of ecological crisis or class struggle. Looking at history from a certain angle, there was once a “good case” for the evolution of class struggle into a revolutionary attack on capital, preparing for communism as a ubiquitous socal/economic relation. History, and the present, have no shortage of evidences, of patterns and trends, fodder for every Jane Doe and her pool-hall theories. This is not to discount the extinctions, the ravaging of sundry ecosystems, the depletion of certain resources, the potential consequences of an oceanic die-off, as well as the already evident—the forests turned to tree farms, the dead rivers, the moonscape oil fields, the spread of uranium, the wolf hunts, the towns and cities unknowingly turned into test populations for dangerous chemicals, disease control strategies, the rapid conversion of a city into a camp, a landbase into a mine, “territorial autonomy” into occupation. We don’t need clairvoyants to see trends. We are tricked only when we mistake the evident for one possible outcome of what is already in motion, losing the distinction between possibility and present fact.
Awareness of the ecological state of the world, in the end, is a point against desertion as a geographical concept. Politically speaking, it is impossible to escape society and attack from the fringes in a world mapped to the square inch, perpetually circled by drones and satellites. Some of the more interesting rural struggles in recent history, the anti-road struggles in the UK, the No TAV struggles in Italy, the current fight against the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, are especially interesting because of the interaction between urban radicals and land-based struggles, because of the spread of ideas and discussions coming from these sites. There is no more frontier where forest squatters may escape to after making war on development. Rather, we move between different spaces in the interconnected sphere of global metropoli. Tragically, the lack of communication and barriers to solidarity render the land struggles of indigenous peoples in the Pacific, in the Amazon, and worldwide, far more precarious. Yet these spaces are no more off the map than elsewhere. They simply fall lower on global capital’s scale between all-seeing and convenient blindness.
We do not wait for a total economic collapse, for the further articulation of ecological catastrophes, with the glazed eyes of a filmgoer. Neither to flee to the woods and prepare oneself in isolation, reading one’s playbook for chronologies of economic deterioration. It is a curious mode for the anarchist, waiting for the best course of action to be elaborated, for the world situation to become undeniably clear (whatever that could mean). It is a worldview that sees politics as a world apart, static to a point, or changing with a clear direction—not a thing dynamic, unpredictable, ever in flux. That society is constantly negotiated through conflict (most of the time suppressed), that openings for opposition always exist, that time warps around our reaching for liberty and the wild—these are bases for any insurgency, any anarchist act.
Capitalism, as well as the structures and relations that pre-date it, has always been a “situation,” has always existed in a net of opposition, of crises, of new technologies, of failed cities and starving populations. To think that current trends and limits are insurmountable in the present, in contrast to all other crashes and depletions of the past, seems unlikely. If capitalism is indeed “unsustainable,” incapable of surviving another five hundred years without turning the earth into a lifeless moonscape, on a certain level this is irrelevant. Crises, crashes and collapse will surely play into the topography of the near future, but there is a great difference between elements and dynamics within a political-economic context, and inflated stories like worldwide industrial collapse at the flick of a switch.
It is not enough to describe limits, even with irrefutable logic and evidence, to make capital implode, to set about a rapid dissolving of society. Desertion is not an ecological necessity, nor a moral imperative. It is a single action within the sphere of social relations, a particular movement and vantage from which one may prepare and compose herself, from which to pose acts, questions, invitations. Moral limits and predictions have never proved to hinder the march of wealth and industry in the past. And even if such a collapse is inevitable—what does it mean to us right now, if the stock market crashes forty years from now and doesn’t come back up, if banks no longer exist in a hundred years, if in two hundred years there isn’t a single nation-state left, if a mythical state of primitive freedom encircles the globe long after we are worm-food and dirt?
Community
The question of community is inherently different from that of organization, federation, strategy. It cannot be viewed as a means, as a path to achieve certain ends, to confront the existent; it is rather a complex of relationships and a certain identity, or belonging, which exists above these individuals and relationships. On the one hand, we face the impossibility of community within capitalist society, the difficulty of authentic relationships that would compose it within the complex of repression, inhibitions and inward violence that we live. Yet to simply pose community as something that happens after a revolution imposes still more limits on the way we approach daily life. So here the challenge is to think of community now, without a nostalgia for small-town social dynamics, without a valorization of our social networks that still carry the burdens of society, without a whitewashing of the coercion that often exists in collectives.
I approach the question of community from two sides. From the one, as I would a world of free relations and interactions; from the other, as I would a world of mediated relations, hierarchies and deception—in other words, the world we live in. I have the distinct sense that I have never truly experienced community. At the same time, I have been in, and through, many communities. Often, I have felt as a stranger floating through an alien landscape, torn between a sense of belonging and a scorn for the contrived interactions that surround me. I do not wish to twist a definition of community into one serving my egoistic ends. However, I note a bipolarity of experience. In moments of strength, I have the courage to be honest, to criticize or abandon the alienated interactions that make up various communities, to tear back illusions of approaching my desires through mere social or subcultural acceptance. In moments of weakness, I fall back into unwanted patterns and pursue relations of comfort, fixating on fleeting convivial moments, erasing my critiques under an imagined “collective good.”
Here one must ask: what is community? And then, is it truly something we seek, and why? And while this questioning may take certain utopian angles, it must also take place in the context of real relationships, our immediate lives, the definitions that exist regardless of intentions to the contrary. Community may be defined in the most simple way, as a group of people living in or in some way sharing the same space. This could be a village or small town, or a group of people within a city or larger area, sharing space in terms of relationships, events and ideas.
One cannot ignore the aspects of living community plagued by mediation, how these establish privileges and informal hierarchies. Take the case of anarchists, where knowledge of certain texts and websites, dress, musical taste, and social networking abilities may stand in for one’s ideas and passions, placing her on a scale to be judged.
Communities of choice play large in this discussion. Punk, squatter, anarchist, traveler, queer. I have at least dipped my feet in all, come and gone, come and gone. I have often felt somewhat at odds with these groupings, conflicted in the identity that draws me in, and all the implications that follow. Sometimes it is more comfortable to stay on the fringes, the greater downside being the unease that a stranger brings, making closer interactions and shared experiences difficult. Yet at the centre of these communities, their contradictions become more clear. They tend to revolve around certain ideas, practices, lifestyles, music, dress and other factors. Along with an affinity for shared interests, and the relationships that may come of this, we see a variety of social codes that determine who belongs and who doesn’t, that may establish credibility and trust. The most immediate danger here is where relations are determined by things other than the sincere and open interactions that may concretely develop closeness and trust.
Now there are serious limits to any community based on circumstance, living in the same place or sharing the same political label. Yet these material forms are still more interesting than certain utopian ideas of community, because of their imperfections, the divisions and conflicts that exist within them. After all, I do not seek to escape the tyranny of this world for the tyranny of a “perfect” community—sustainable, non-hierarchical, whatever formula one might choose to erase the tensions that inevitably exist between people in any setting.
One need not choose between escape and complacency. I wish to define community so that it may be confronted, acted upon. It may not be possible to infuse existing communities with new ideas and different interactions, especially where these are foundational to that space. The question then grows broader: to create new and desired communities, and to approach existing communities as sites of conflict. One may halt upon this point. Anarchist community as site of conflict? I am not proposing a mud-slinging between clans, yet neither need all that calls itself “anarchist” be sacred. Where a community produces deceit, exclusion, repressed passions, inertia and defeatism—these are grounds on which to fight. Little has ever come of merging with a mass and wishing for it to be different.
The question falls onto the commune, and communization. And these are large questions, for in spite of the great volume of text on communization in recent years, most explorations are still very much tentatives, remaining in theoretical spheres, barely broaching the subject of material practices. And why? Because it is at great risk that one endorses specific visions and describes concrete forms, in so doing already opening the gates to recuperation. I hold no pretense that the sharing of food and rent, the creation of certain collective resources, the opening outward of individual property, are communization. After all, this is only one form of property, and collective dynamics are merely a different dynamics that exists within capitalism—while I seek the abolition of property, the destruction of capitalist social relations, for the creation of different relations outside. Things which are difficult to speak of in the present, though we cannot forever speak of them in the abstract, in the future. Hence, I have little empathy for those who wish to create different settings and different dynamics within capitalism, for a pat on the back, a sense of living out one’s values. These are the same limits posed on any anarchist practice in the immediate. Values are cheap, and I disdain their spreading through moral imperatives, when already capitalist society accomodates an immeasurable diversity of values within its sphere.
Communization cannot be defined in the collective application of “anarchist values” in daily practices. Rather it is how we envisage the abolition of capitalist relations, how we project ourselves toward these ends. As we cannot produce relations outside of capitalism, or an ideal of free association, the question is always how we imagine and tend toward these ends. As there is no “outside” of structures of power, there are no non-hierarchical collectives, no non-dominant relationships. There are only anti-hierarchical collectives, acts and intents against domination, as we adopt a shared antagonism, and live this tension together in our lives.
Anarchists do not anticipate the total realization of our will or an end to struggle within our lifetimes—and to expect such as the future product of a certain dialectic requires a great deal of delusion. While it is easy to be disheartened at this, and many take it for a reason to develop comfortable lives and social networks, to approximate their ideas and values in certain relationships or scenes, the question of communes and communization is elsewhere.
We can view these things in two ways: as forms, and as tendencies. To me, the commune is not a thing to generalize at all costs. It is a certain form in which to strengthen affinities and develop practices, to tend toward a struggle that embodies the relations we want. Yet it is one path toward liberatory struggle, one form through which we may flesh out a shared will against domination—not the only one. Communes are interesting where they are developing ideas and perspectives, sharpening attacks and spreading through autonomous and willful means. Yet the anarchist struggle is large, and liberty is a wide, unknown land—to be approached from many sides, with different tools and methods, by people with different ideas and wants, always deepening one’s sense of her own position, always creating new forms from which we may heal, grow stronger and attack. The moment the commune is articulated as the form to adopt, the moment that communization becomes the perspective that seeks to shape and control anti-capitalist struggle—is the moment to attack, burn down its edifice of superiority and expertise, and return it to its proper place among all other forms and tendencies through which we explore our potential toward liberation.
Community differs from the commune in that it is broader; not inherently larger in numbers, but broader in the scope of life it incorporates. It does not imply the same intensity of shared space, of shared time and intentions, of a singular will to exist as a commune. There is a degree of shared will, in terms of seeking affinity between the different forms within it, in terms of a will to take something from the shared space, the communication and relationships that make up this community. It may include communes within it, but also individuals, affinity groups, collectives, and varied relations between all these entities—including conflict and tension between them. People may come into it and leave it according to their will, and it may split up, or dissolve, when no longer desired. It is not based on an intensely shared analysis or perspective, as an affinity group, nor is it exclusive based on existing social relationships and dynamics. Yet neither is it a welcome center for subtle coercions, for sabotage or abuse, after a hollow principle of inclusivity.
But what is the point of such a community, if it is not an organization seeking to diffuse anarchist ideas, and build up specific structures and resources? It is a space for experimentation, where one may explore the terms of her alienation, the limits and social constructs that pervade our lives, seeking out ways to eliminate the dependence and pressures that characterize much of what we call friendship; to develop different ways of interacting, different types of relations that are more true to our wants, exploding shells and habits of submission to social roles.
And where we seek to build communities in revolt, these cannot remain focused on interior relations, on the experiments that happen within their bounds. Where the will to break down social pressures and patterns of manipulation drives us to community, to act and interact differently, we seek simultaneously to explode the bounds of these communities, to spread our sentiments more broadly, to share our explorations so that others may learn from them, adopt or alter them to their own desires, generalizing the intent to destroy commodified social relations. Within this dynamic, the community is only one form, one aspect. The point is not to fixate on this one constellation of relationships, but to address all in relation to each other: the idea, the act, the individual, the one-on-one, the gang of friends, the affinity group, the commune, the community, the broader spectrum of relationships expanding from there, each form fulfilling certain functions in the demolition of society.
The other piece of community is in generating strong ideas: debate, critique, and a sharpening of analysis and practice. In isolation it is difficult to push one’s perspective farther, for the lack of conflict, of external input, of exposure to different perspectives. Without discussion one gains little confidence, thoughts grow increasingly abstract and impractical, and we grow lazy and timid in our ideas. As well, in a closed group sharing one dogma, individuals develop their ideas further, but do so through an ever-further removal from the outside, where the only criticism and doubts come from the initiated, and thus become further armor around their ideology—ever growing deaf as they dig deeper and deeper tunnels. Yet neither do I wish for a community of loosely defined affinity, where dissent is suppressed on the pretext of working together, where the lowest common denominator is sought and the more critical and radical ideas and acts are outlawed for the purpose of accessibility, of waiting for some later date on the calendar of a forgotten prophet. No, I wish for community based on a general will to revolt and to deconstruct the inter/personal dynamics of society, allowing for different perspectives on how and with open discussion and debate, a breeding ground for revolutionaries of various chosen forms and methods, a springboard for reflection and acts, and a den of solidarity and silence, defended without hesitation from encroachments by the state and other forces of the social order.
Such a community will inevitably hurdle down a dark path, plumbing deeper mysteries and desires. Its scope is as broad as learning how to live, together. The relations explored within burst the bounds of identity, attacking every coercion and laying bare every act and artifice of power. This can include the twisting and breaking of gender roles, eliminating manners and codes of presentation, destroying invisible patterns of competition and mockery, attacking the subtle pressures to conform that exist in radical circles as elsewhere—meanwhile, building up a culture of mutual honesty, directness, critique, unrepressed passions, openness to negative sentiments without personal offense, to positive sentiments without mockery; an immoral willingness to cooperate and compete without value judgments, to confront deceit and passive manipulations; while keeping the humor for play and games, and the deception and subterfuge that these can include, without allowing deception to subtly pervade and dominate our ways of interacting.
The attack
This may seem out of place following various discussions on social forms in relation to the practice of revolt. Or it may seem perfectly in place after these, given the notion of the attack as the end-form of anarchist practice, where all developing of affinities, all organizing, all propaganda, all pieces of struggle come together at the end into one road toward attack, then more attacks, spreading into days of rioting, barricades, insurrection, and finally, after the insurrection—the beginning of any concrete discussion on liberty, on how we wish to live, to work or not, to secure our needs and relate to each other how we wish. Now, I don’t disagree with the need for a revolutionary break with society before any total leap forward into lives, relationships and communities in the absence of capitalist relations and other dominant structures can happen. And I don’t entirely disagree with the above sequence of events as a very rough summary of a build-up to a revolutionary moment, from where greater explorations become possible. Yet this is one specific angle in which to view the struggle. Physical acts of aggression and sabotage against the state and capital, while very relevant in an arsenal of practices, cannot be taken as the single ultimate act to be reproduced and spread, or as a make or break of “revolution.” Meanwhile, many things may be done in defiance of capital, long before its influence is physically destroyed.
One must take into account that the attack is a social form in itself, not merely the consequence or end goal of social forms. We cannot take the attack in isolation, without seeing the relations that inspire and sharpen it, and the relations that it creates in turn. “Propaganda by the deed” is not simply a euphemism for attack, sabotage, destroy. Bombings, arson, assassinations and other acts were not always viewed as ends in themselves, nor even acts to be reproduced such that once a certain frequency of offensive acts would be attained, the state would collapse, capital would retreat, and we would begin discussing how to live our lives. Instead, attacks were viewed as forms of communication, as much as a poster or pamphlet, communicating the impulse to act immediately on our wills, and hence deepening the force of ideas behind one’s antagonism.
This understanding of attack as a single element within the larger context of struggle has been often lost within the issue-based, anti-corporate, fragmented grounds on which anarchists of today tend to act, blending into a hard-to-define radical milieu. Even if we take the ALF and ELF, two of the longer lasting clandestine radical groups1 in recent North American history—much of the discourses in their communiqués, as well as that which tends to surround them in broader discussions, describes a form of arsonist activism, the furthest extension of nonviolent direct action. Within this context we hear the rhetoric of property damage, the loss in dollar amounts incurred through the destruction of certain buildings or infrastructure. Here, one envisions success in the idea that she can “defeat” certain corporations by bankrupting them through economic damages—or, that she can defeat a development project by preventing the construction of a road or the logging of a forest.
Now, these are useful and interesting acts, but when one’s analysis is constricted to the stopping of one project, then perhaps another one, and another after that—or even to destroying one fur farm after another until the entire industry is destroyed—the greater context, the greater potential and relevance of these struggles and these acts is lost in the narrow vision through which they are communicated. Take the SHAC2 campaign of the early 2000’s, attacking Huntingdon Life Sciences through its scientists, its executives and the banks funding it, toward intimidating its staff and bankrupting the corporation, on the basis of its exploitation of animals in testing, primarily for pharmaceuticals. It was radical for the convictions and tenacity of actors, and perhaps for its “effectiveness,” or its expansiveness, yet starving for ideas. Or take the ELF’s first guideline: To inflict maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment. So car culture and the petrol industry are attacked in the Romania SUV arson; the development of dwindling lynx habitat is sabotaged by the Vail ski lodge arson. Or in the case of Earth First!, the coal industry is stabbed in the heart by blocking the entry to a single power plant for a single day. In all these cases, where they are “successful,” we hear a similar rhetoric, an analysis of dollars of damage incurred—one step closer to destroying coal, logging, mining, petrol, cars, dams and airports.
We stumble on the absurdity of a specific opposition to earth-exploiting industries when in the end, few industries are not earth-exploiting; and what form of production is not also one of pollution? What form of development, of research, of work, is not in some way an attack on the wild, a further encroachment of capitalist and technological logic into every space, on every scale, while simultaneously erasing its tracks so that “paperless offices,” paying for plastic bags, ridges flattened for windmills, mountains blasted open for high-speed trains, and giant magnifying glasses in space produce the illusion of a society in harmony with “nature” through its total enclosure, commodification and control—as much in a supermarket as a forest, as much in a river as a farm as a city street.
Granted, every attack must by nature be specific, and even if our ideas are general, there is little to gain in choosing targets that could only be understood by those who are already anti-capitalist, anti-civilization or anarchist, if more comprehensible targets could be chosen. Communication is important outside of the act, but if an attack can be easily understood without the need to seek out and read a communiqué, its social effect is likely to be much greater. The destruction of turnstyles following a fare hike is an obvious example. An attack on a widely opposed development project, a corporation in a maligned industry, or a recruitment center in times of war preparation may all be aptly chosen targets. And if people are able to stop a development project, to destroy a laboratory that won’t be rebuilt, or bankrupt a corporation, all the better of course. But regardless of capacity, of the scale of attack, the way one approaches the act need not change. To attack a corporation in order to then communicate facts about that corporation, or to stop a project in order to communicate “victory!” is a great waste of the attack’s social potential. It can be useful to communicate the facts regarding this specific opposition—but also to communicate a broader analysis and opposition to all domination and exploitation (without subcultural slang and other insular language), the need for not only an increase in number and intensity of attacks, but also a broadening of scope beyond certain industries, beyond corporations generally, toward generalized attacks on the state and capital, against all signs of our alienation, on the perpetrators, exploiters, bosses and landlords that haunt our daily lives.
We cannot separate the attack from the ideas that inspire it and that it inspires, from the space in which it occurs, the other struggles that surround it, the communications of these struggles, the passions that drive individuals within them, the intense relations that deepen ideas and produce more attacks, the knowledge that from the street to the workplace to the home to prison to the forest, while different settings demand specific approaches, the struggle against this world and for a full possession of our lives takes place globally in any place at any time, independent of popular opinion, of social movements, economic collapse, and other social forces that will affect and shape our struggles, but that we must not chain ourselves behind.
On play and social forms
I remember when I was a child, seeing the world with wide eyes, the raw intensity which I felt in my approach to the world. How clear it was that I felt at odds with my so-called education, with the time spent sitting in a classroom, how strange to be forced to listen, to take notes—and the element of distrust with which my responses were taken. That an answer would not suffice, if I did not show how I arrived at this answer; that an idea was taken for plagiarism if I didn’t say whose idea it was, or where I found it. The frequent idea that children cannot properly think, that they are mere conduits for the intentions of others, to quote, puppet, or mimic what they see and hear. All this at the form of school, before even mentioning my response at certain facts and ideas presented by teachers, which struck me as forms of subtle deception and coercion, in that we must accept their facts, their ideas.
I remember the oddness of table manners, of certain conventions of behavior, of how to act, talk and speak in particular social situations—with little sense of where these things come from, why we play out these roles and games, with no explanation. When I read a piece that described a group of monkeys sitting around a dinner table, with their own forms of etiquette, it struck a chord inside me. It captured perfectly the absurdity of social forms and conventions, how ridiculous that billions of people pass through their entire lives reproducing what we call society, never questioning it, beyond certain undirected “what if” explorations, while in the grasp of various substances.
These days, I am not against table manners in the same way I am against police, prisons and class society, but the initial response is much the same.
I remember the bitterness with which I faced exclusion, mockery, the development of hierarchies and competitive relations among kids; the artifical kindness, the shifting of allegiances and reputations by association, the rumors that unload faster than a Kalashnikov clip. The alienation I felt carried a full range of responses, from envy to rage, from fleeing to crying, acting to developing a hard, silent face. From feeling left out in a setting to feeling distinctly at odds with the setting and all that created it—the wholesale reproduction of society in age-segregated groups of youth, complete with work, sabotage and cheating, with police and criminality, with responsibilities and incentives, with social capital, with proles, with racist jokes, with hot girls, dick-measuring and the reproduction of sexual norms.
I remember discovering that I could be funny, that I didn’t have to be uniquely silent, serious and strange—the immediate joy at filling a role that was socially rewarded, satisfying in different ways than any I’d occupied before. But the feeling does not take long to grow hollow. To be a funnyman my whole life, to live for these moments of wit, for a form of collective entertainment, would have been a grand ploy, an easy way to ride through life, until the bottom falls out and reveals the gaping chasm of a whole world belying the joke.
I remember racing through the woods, climbing trees, forging new trails, looking with the eyes of a warrior out on clean-cut lawns, white aluminum houses, aboveground swimming pools, the road full of cars—another world entirely. I built forts and shacks, imagined building a house in the woods and living in it for a whole summer or longer. Exploring the far side of the mountain behind our house, finding trails and roads I’d never seen before, I imagined hidden towns and villages unseen by other eyes. I ran away in the middle of winter, built an igloo and slept in it, only to go back home through the basement around three in the morning.
I laid awake, my eyes wide, forcing out any encroachment of fatigue—waiting to be sure my parents were asleep. When the night was sufficiently advanced, I slipped out the basement door, made my way through the woods, across the neighbor’s yard and down their driveway to the road. From there I walked the two miles into town, ducking in a ditch at the sight of headlights, heading for the 24-hour store to buy a box of donuts, a candy bar or a soda—and come back home. Sometimes I did this alone, sometimes with friends.
I recall one night in particular when the wind was so loud we could barely hear each other talk. The trees were almost galloping upon us, the phone poles shaking. We watched an electric wire throwing sparks, and I wondered what might happen. Would we lose power? Would we be cut off from the rest of the world? Yet this cut-off feeling is nothing new, just a reflection of the dissonance between the hours drawn out under the spotlights and microscopes of authority, and the moments stolen from these intruders—when my voice, my body and my acts are my own, imagining if time, the world, and I could be cut off from these permanent attacks. Each body to itself, each act for its own pleasure, the wild world left to its own spitting desires.
If I can name one feeling I have had for most of my life, it is the feeling of waiting for something. For more than twelve hours in the woods, more than a vague excitement when the windows were broken out in my high school, more than one night of good sex, more than a mushroom trip, more than feeding people, more than a protest, more than a riot. More than one social space, more than one close friend, more than a sick show, more than books, movies, fleeting passions, parties that are always the same, friendships that slowly fizzle out, strikes that get sold out, trendhopper revolutionaries that come to the street when it’s the cool thing, and radicals who are in it for the long haul—if the long haul only means the upkeep and maintenance of a radical scene, of institutions that lend the appearance of an anarchist movement (or museum?). Before one reacts—it’s not that I’ve been sitting in my room observing, hoping for new revolutionary developments. Rather, that participating and acting can take on the character of waiting when one’s acts do not carry the full weight of her dreams and desires, when her affinities become containers for her passions, when her projects become more and more like work.
When I first discovered the existence of anarchists in my city, and then anarchist texts, publishers, convergences, houses, squats and other fixtures, I felt that I had really found it. I remember the excitement I felt for months after, in reading, discussing, participating in anarchist events, learning the slang and expressions, discussing non-monogamy and gender non-conformity, or “the collapse,” and hearing about different campaigns and spaces. Yet it didn’t take terribly long for the excitement to hollow out. Like any new discovery, a new passion or love, it is easy to throw your heart and body into it, project your spectrum of desires onto it, believe it is everything you’ve wanted and that it’ll be there to take care of you for the rest of your life. There are many—the anarchist “lifers” we read of elsewhere—who settle into a happy married life with what they call anarchy. It is largely these who maintain the long-term structures of anarchist organizing and cultural production.
Once my doubts began to surface, my excitement didn’t vanish instantly. For a long time excitement coexisted with certain critiques, a feeling of something lacking. The excitement declined to a lower intensity, much as with any hobby or interest, while the early critiques were difficult to put to words, the lack was felt but just what was missing—impossible to describe.
To the professional revolutionary, this may all seem like so many childish responses, so many petty acts of rebellion, so many emotions—nothing political, nothing serious. They may call this all distracting from the point, obscuring the greater subjects of power and domination. However, we have plenty of studies and explorations into capital and the relations it produces, into the forms and functions of state power, the role of the police in society, patriarchy and its many faces and tentacles, extinctions and other afterthoughts in the strip-mining of the earth. We also have many personal accounts and memoirs, documenting the alienation and oppression of so many individuals, creating an invisible network of support, waving the tag of “personal as political.” Yet the production of binaries, whether one favors one side or values both, does us little good—and less often do we fill the space between personal experience and revolt against larger structures of domination.
A conversation with a friend recently gave this insight. Friendship is more than just a combination of shared social projects and emotional support. There are many other aspects and nuances that fall between the two, that embody both, and that cannot be contained by this spectrum between the emotional and the social/political. In the same way, the anarchist project is not the adding of social/emotional support networks, or myriad ways of dealing with the alienation of capitalist society, to anarchist organizations and physical attacks on the state and capital. To say each has their place misses the point. Each may have its place depending on the social context, the individuals involved, the ways they are approached, the greater ideas surrounding them. Anarchists do not seek a combination of discrete practices, but even a continuum is insufficient as it imposes boundaries and limits, beginnings and ends. Any act, any idea is anarchist as far as it seeks the destruction of all structures and relations of domination, the razing of society as a fixed constellation of practices, the pursuit and exploration of liberty at every scale of life, and the development of free relations of willed solidarity and affinity. Any action that doesn’t carry these intentions within it, even a practice commonly affiliated with anarchist struggle, even one that calls itself “anarchist”—misses the mark.
The anarchist approach to rebellion is unique in that it cannot develop or follow a revolutionary science, there can be no defined mode of struggle, no anatomy of an anarchist organization, no singular process or political form—despite the prevalence in recent decades of formal consensus. Anarchists recognize the limits of organization and organizing (or so I hope), the impossibility to project certain forms onto a desired future, the inability to draw a model for what we want through our collaborations and collectives.
Since we cannot describe what our lives would become, what communities could look like, what a world free of domination could be, the projection of an anarchist vision takes on the form of play. I do not mean that it is a joke—but that it seeks ever to surpass boundaries. From where we stand, we have no ability to describe a single unrepressed individual, freed from all relations of domination and submission. So how could we describe a community, or further still, a society free of all the dynamics and pressures into which we are initiated from birth—and still harder if we take society itself to be the entire agglomeration of social behaviors, interactions and forms, which we have little choice in reproducing?
If we dismiss play, we adopt the constrained attitude that there are avenues, forms and systems established through which we may channel our revolt—and that we must take these, if we wish to have an effect, for our voices to be heard. It is as true with molotovs and guns as with petitions, lawsuits, and party politics. Changing the system from within, joining the structures and parties of power, does not equal seeking revolutionary transformation through time-tested, pre-determined forms of organizing, counter-power, sabotage and revolt. But they spring from the same logic of follow my lead, of doctrines of practice, of imitation, of seeking indescribable ends through means already drawn out and defined, in a certain sense permitted. It is a similar process as that of the child learning to fulfill social roles—and the same way a child may grow up to be a social worker, council-member or military sniper, she may call herself a radical with a rocket launcher or a thousand signatures, failing to see the limits of mere acts, the impossibility of destroying domination through even revolutionary social roles.
To return once more to childhood, we see that there are two different ways children learn. One is through play, and the other through social forms. In language, a child plays at speaking before she speaks, officially. She imitates sounds, repeats words, invents new words, and approaches language organically. It is only when it comes to grammar and syntax, to the rules of language (as much in forbidden words as in sentence structure), that language takes on a pre-existing social form, and hence a structure of domination. Yet it is when we choose to make incomplete sentences, to speak in codes, to make games out of conversations, to invent slang, to create our own meaning for words, that we abandon the structures and rules of language, and treat communication as a form of play, a tool we can shape to our own will in defiance of social norms and authority.
It is the same in sports. Where anything can be a toy, one can easily invent games with what is at her disposal, as of course children always do. Even with official sports, one might watch a game of soccer without knowing how it works, and then play at soccer, having a ball and some friends to play with. The result will not likely be the same game, with the same rules, the same positions, the same time limits—but it will probably be far more interesting and fun to those who play. Likewise, one may go build a shelter in the woods and sleep in it without all the established norms and practices of camping, the “necessary” equipment, the mowed and surveilled capitalist campgrounds, or the facilities of National Parks with their own infrastructure, their own police, their own laws.
It is the same way that finding a book and reading it out of a desire to do so, learning or taking what one can from it, is far more interesting and useful than any book one is required to read for school—and will hence avoid reading, skim or find notes and summaries, in order to shirk the obligation.
And how many people will say they’ve gained more in life from school or from job trainings than from their chosen relationships, the books they wanted to read, their spontaneous adventures, the pursuits that are driven by their passions and interests? There is a qualitative difference between someone who becomes a mechanic through a fascination with motors, a love of tinkering, an irresistible draw to the smell of grease—and one who pursues a career, submitting to social pressures, seeking stability or modest wealth, who goes to the same job five days a week, from twenty five to sixty five, living for weekends, holidays and vacations, waiting for retirement to retreat from the pressures of the world and live out her last years in rest and relaxation. After all, is not any society that produces cars, or computers, or roads, or ships—purely to serve a social necessity—in itself totalitarian, even if it calls itself anarchist? Is this not the fundamental difference between work and play, desire and fear, obligation and the willingness to go forth into what is unknown, full of risk and danger, but at the same time so attractive we cannot peel ourselves from it? Is this not why we are anarchists—yet hate to put too much intention into a single word, wary lest it become a prison, like so many other words?
And before one brings up the fear of marauding wolves, communicable diseases, deadly plants and famine—people die all over the world from most of these things today. And these are not people living in a “state of anarchy,” rather in the poverty and disorganization produced by colonization and capitalist society, from which a small number of people are wealthy beyond our imagination. In the meantime, the roles and tasks which demand such precision that failure would mean death are incredibly few compared to the things which nearly anybody can do with a year or two of learning through practice—and even if it is longer, what is five or ten years spent learning to do something that you really want?
As well, humans have lived for thousands of years without the benefits of modern architecture and engineering, so that today the amount of people that die in bridge and tunnel collapses, buildings falling in earthquakes, car crashes, trainwrecks and other routine technological failures casts a shadow over the deaths by attacking predators and poisonous mushrooms of past ages—things which still kill people today. (For the record, I am making a qualitative argument and absolutely not a statistical one. Even if wolves killed proportionately more people in 1000 BC than workplace accidents and engineering disasters do today, it is irrelevant—we are seeking more life, not more and longer lives.) If progress and civilization are measured by life expectancy, prevalence of certain diseases, or the amount of junk we can shove in our mouths, as we are often misled to think, the issue is not that civilization has not progressed far enough, that we merely lack for time or technology, that more specializations will come to fix the problems created by the specializations we have—rather that civilization and progress are in themselves vampiric, that all we have are facts and statistics to mask the profound discontent and alienation we feel, that suicide, addiction and insanity are the most prevalent and reliable responses to the murderous enclosure of our social relations, as long as revolt fails to destroy them.
Now it is a fearsome thing, letting go of organizing forms, not trying to plan, and hence to own, a revolt against society and the venturing forth into what comes after. We are used to situations where we are in control, or where somebody is—so that a lack of control and panic become nearly synonymous. And even when one lets go of the impulse to plan and organize all, even to the point of laughing at rigid ideologies—the anticipation of failure or defeat is an easy excuse to avoid the fearful endeavor of thinking about what we really want, how we can launch ourselves toward these ends, and what that means for us today, right now. As long as our ideas and desires, our forms and acts of revolt are mediated through existing groups, defined ideologies, developed practices, milieus in which we find comfort and acceptance, actions that only parrot others of five, ten or fifty years ago—we feel safe. Our risks are limited, taken in a known context of support and solidarity. Our sense of failure today mimics the sense of failure we anticipate five years from now. Our nostalgia, our memory of small moments of excitement, our small perceived victories, all serve the daily reproduction of “radical politics” and its subsumption into society.
After all, the imagination can be a tyrant, play can be dangerous, children can be cruel, and the world is a dark place far from streetlights, highways and supermarkets. To not have plans means to relinquish control over the future, even if right now we control only the smallest grain of sand on the beach under this city. To unleash the fullness of a revolt against society, the tidal force of rage against all the humiliations inflicted on us, the mass of writhing desire and repressed poetry hidden inside us, is to set loose a horde of Vandals in the world, a plague upon all power and exploitation. It lends a new sense to the word “mass,” in which the mass of will in one individual may be greater than the power in a mass of thousands with their heads down, seeking only to express their protest at certain injustices, ready to go home with a few concessions, or without. So we play, with whatever tools, toys and playmates we can find, with science and magic, with new and old skills, with all the world hanging in the balance. We have little to bet, yet we gamble on the far, distant possibility of the smallest taste of a world full of unshackled joys, of one day free of ill-cached contempt, of five minutes of love free of inhibitions, without discomfort and the encroachment of cafés, diamonds and other cogs in the machinery that we have come to call life.
And yet, what good anarchist, seeking greater equality and the welfare of all, would take such a risk—would release such a danger into the world? Should we not first wait, to be sure that the world is ready?
What I refer to as the “CL(ASSE)” is the CLASSE (La Coalition large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante) and the post-CLASSE ASSÉ (l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante). Although distinct in a few ways (several mandates and associations) the one dissolved into the other, and can not be discussed separately.
Following the strike, many ‘radicals’ have taken to elaborating how the CL(ASSE) accomplished an assumed what. Its form is praised, its content misunderstood and its function left at “victory.”
I.
Content
A common misconception about the CL(ASSE) is that it is anti-capitalist. It is not. The CL(ASSE) is a social democratic organization – simply look at its stated goals. This politic lies at the heart of every pronouncement that tuition hikes are a “political choice” easily solved through “progressive economics.” The main aim of the strike for CL(ASSE) – blocking the tuition hike – was articulated invariably as a project of better management. Its logic is one of efficiency and harmony, easily achieved through better policy.
In the massive mobilization campaign before the 2012 strike, the CL(ASSE) used a few main propaganda tools. Of the most important pieces of literature was the “Faut-il vraiment augmenter les frais de scolarité” brochure produced by IRIS, an economic research institute in Montreal. It grounds the CL(ASSE)’s claims about the economics of tuition. The text goes through numerous arguments for why the tuition hike is unnecessary. The problem can be solved by a better distribution of funds; the universities can get more funding if the government taxed the rich more. The pamphlet reads “…increased tuition fees will change the way education is funded, favouring a private funding model over the principle of public funding.” In this equation, where the state is synonymous with the public, the goal is a massive welfare state, a benevolent paternalism, a capitalism with a human face.
The problem then transitions from just a question of tuition to one of distributive economics. So, for example, when faced with the question of funding for education, the CL(ASSE)’s Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois argues for a better Plan Nord, one where the profits from the exploitation of indigenous land are more evenly distributed among Quebec’s citizens.
‘Solutions’, though, are not only to be found by looking inwards. Placed at the top of pamphlets for the new “La gratuité scolaire” campaign launched in the aftermath of the strike (as well as prominently on the new website for that campaign for free education), a revealing graphic calls for Quebec to follow in the footsteps of other governments which have maintained financial accessibility to universities. The graphic ends a short homage to other countries’ free education with the reflexive injunction, “why don’t we join them?” Join who, the reader inquires? Well, Greece, Spain, Germany, Iceland, Morocco and Argentina to name a few. Placing all these states into the same graphic brings up too many contradictions to be adequately explored here. But regardless, do they actually believe one should look to the Greek state for guidance? They are perhaps confused by what some find inspiring in Athens these days.
“If the government had not made the political decision to weaken our tax system, we would have all the money we need to publicly finance our public services and keep them accessible. Today, if we collectively decide to protect our tax-based education funding, we could reverse that tendency.” Simple as that.
The CL(ASSE) hearkens back to a time before finance capital and deindustrialization; a poetics of war-industrial economies and state wealth. There is no analysis of ‘austerity’ and the crisis of which it is a product, beyond the fact that it is part of ‘neoliberalism’ and is ‘bad’. Even if they desire it, the hands of time can not simply be swung backward four decades. Today’s capitalism is not that of the late 60s and early 70s – the era which saw the birth of radical student syndicalism in Quebec. Quebec is not an isolated entity – in time or space. The age of a capitalism based on production, in North American, is gone. The Labour struggle which grounds syndicalist thought is all but decimated. The syndicalist “anti-capitalist” is painfully misguided. My last job was telemarketing – should I seize the phones? Or for my next job, tell me what a self-managed Canadian Tire looks like.
This confused ideal, drawing both from a history that never was and a present that isn’t, is successfully de-centered in most communication. The emphasis of most of the propaganda material is not on what they are fighting or fighting for, but how they are fighting. The importance given to a tactic (the strike) over what that tactic serves has been a boon for the CL(ASSE).
II.
Form
The disaffiliation wave that hit the FECQ (the federation of Cégeps; rival of the CL[ASSE]) was a long time coming. But so too was the massive wave of resignations that is plaguing the CL(ASSE). Nearly no committee is left unscathed. The Women’s Committee, the Social Struggles Committee, the Information Committee, and the Executive Committee have all seen multiple members resign. This received little to no coverage externally, and is internally chalked up to fatigue. The ASSÉ has not done a proper “reflection on activist exhaustion,” wrote the latest resigning executive in her resignation letter. And it is true; the fatigue is real, profound.
It is not just sleep that is missing. This collective exhaustion is the product of an ideology tired and worn. It is the weariness of a Leftist tradition that gasps with each authoritarian outburst and ideological convert.
The syndicalist form needs two components to maintain its growth and efficiency.
These are organization as ideology and an authoritarian structure.
The latter first.
The CL(ASSE) is not criticized for authoritarianism because it is based on direct democracy. First, then, we must approach direct democracy, as well as the structure which derives its legitimacy from direct democracy’s moral weight. Like the representative democracy which took power before it, and to which this form is its heir, direct democracy is the negation of autonomy in favor of majoritarianism. It is an extremely useful rhetoric, as it allows those who wield it to one up power on its own terms. But such advantage of rhetoric comes at the cost of replicating what is ostensibly being opposed. It is certainly worth dwelling, at least for a moment, on democracy itself. Is it not at least strange that an ideology promoted by every Western ruling class is embraced in a slightly altered form by those who ostensibly oppose this social order? Direct democracy modifies representative democracy by extending authority. It grants to a larger group the ability to make decisions, laws, and codes for and over any given person. It never challenges the fundamental concept of a given institution’s ability to rule. Ideas become opinions and opinions subjected to an official body. The official body then decides over the person how they can act. Direct democracy demands that decisions taken by a given body – in the CL(ASSE)’s case a general assembly – be respected by all.
I should be perfectly clear, however, that this is not an argument against general assemblies, public forums, or any other sort of gathering. The point here is that gatherings can function to promote projects, actions, strikes, without claiming a governing capacity or a greater importance than other forms of communication, decision-making, and interaction. Legitimacy becomes a function of the thing itself – what is said, done, and felt – not of the metaphysical morality of democracy. In any case, the reason these assemblies were treated seriously was not because of a rational debate surrounding democratic ideals. It was the result of a strong rapport de force springing from, well, force.
Direct democracy forms only one aspect of the CL(ASSE)’s structure. Although many decisions are made at GAs and congresses, most of the actual functioning and content is performed and carried out by councils and committees with more or less power depending on their role. The most powerful body is the Coordination Council. This council approves or finalizes most texts, delegates most duties, and shapes what is usually an unformed line from congresses. This Council is made up of representatives from all the committees and three other groups. The executive committee is the committee with the most influence and power. Take, for instance, the manifesto produced in July by the CL(ASSE). At a congress on June 17, where more than three quarters of the propositions were made by the executive committee, their proposal to write a manifesto passed. The mandate consisted of five positions: a democratic Quebec, a defense of public services, a “social ecology”, a combative syndicalism (syndicalisme de combat), and a feminist critique of the education system. These general principles were made concrete almost exclusively by the executive committee, which then got its seal of approval from the Coordination Council. The text was then brought back to congress for minor adjustments. This is the usual run of things.
All in all, there are merely a handful of people making the decisions. Like the Party, the syndicalist organization is run by those specialists at the top who know what is best.
When critiquing the CL(ASSE), the immediate response is often resentment. How could one critique that which created the strike? Due to the question itself.
The CL(ASSE)’s structure was used as a basis for organizing, and without it, the strike would have been utterly changed. The CL(ASSE) structured the strike proper. But, in case one forgets, people organized the strike, enforced it, planned demos, manif-actions, and everything else that occurred during the strike. The reaction garnered by critique is not merely a cause of narrative. It is because, for many, the narrative is convenient. It locates power outside of any and every person.
The CL(ASSE) is something which creates, maintains and mediates relationships and decisions. This is simultaneously a process of homogenization and direction. As a part of any committee, one’s task, role, and “comrades” are pre-determined. Instead of affinity one has committee. Time is spent with mandated projects and bureaucratic necessity. Solidarity is an organizational reflex. Most of what is called “the strike” – what occurred beyond the university and Cégep walls – was arranged outside of the CL(ASSE). Manif-actions (targeted attacks, blockades and occupations) were almost exclusively planned by groups of roughly 3-10 people, depending on circumstance. Their organization was not overly complicated. Small groups of people also planned and carried out the smoke bombings on the metro, replacing advertisements for propaganda, most demonstrations, attacks on police, etc.
The problem of the CL(ASSE) is a problem of syndicalism. The syndicalist organization takes itself to be the vehicle of revolt. It must continue existing and expanding; it becomes the thing to be defended. The more strength it gathers, the more the syndicalist organization equates itself with resistance. Once this equation is made, it attempts to consume resistance – to make the resistance a part of it. It attempts to other what is outside of it, not only from itself, but also from what it now claims as its own. May 4 in Victoriaville was one such moment. On a day of intense clashes outside of the Liberal Party convention, the spokesperson of the CL(ASSE) called what occurred “unacceptable.” It was an attack on the ruling party’s authority. A day, like April 20 and others, when the state’s paramilitary could not simply enforce its rule. But, to the CL(ASSE), this was “an escalation of the confrontation. . . which does not help at all to resolve the current conflict. The CLASSE will immediately return to the negotiating table. We still believe in dialogue.”
The tool transforms into ideology. Syndicalism rests on programmatic notions of resistance. According to this thinking, ‘change’ is effected through a charted course. There is a plan of action with linear points of escalation, all with dates attached. This ideology, which passes as organization, is in fact a form of control. From one point to the next, the syndicalist organization graphs the resistance and its dénouement. If one believes in this progressive account, inevitably the belief in the organization which sets the dates follows. The person in the syndicalist organization becomes the syndicalist and combat becomes syndicalisme de combat.
III.
Function
We are told that if you opposed the hike, you fall into one of two categories. On the one hand you have the ‘moderates’ or ‘lobbyists’ (depending on who does the telling) – the Federations. On the other, the ‘radical’ student group – the CL(ASSE). It is a very nice picture to have drawn, and one that limits perspective as well as any two-party competition. The false dichotomy filters the strike into a logic that is comprehensible, palatable, and useful to those in power. It is convenient to have two sets of groups, both willing to negotiate, each appealing to different ends of a defined political spectrum.
The convenience is more than just formulaic. The CL(ASSE) itself is useful to the state. I hear often that the CL(ASSE) is not just one thing, it is a coalition of various political tendencies; it is a gathering of people in order to put aside certain differences so that we may, together, resist. What is lost in all this talk of coalitions and associations is that, like all unions, this union, the CL(ASSE), has a politics, a function, a role; these are well-defined and meet certain ends.
The CL(ASSE) is useful because it negotiates. It sees itself as a moderator of ‘student’ interests. The executives and media team will sit, like all good politicians, behind the closed doors of a negotiating room and barter away popular revolt for a good deal. The state needs this. It needs those who see themselves at the head of a certain group because then it can deal with the crisis. They speak the same language of representation. The determination of whether this representation was good or bad then is made by each association – democratically of course!
The CL(ASSE) is useful because it collaborated in the Parti Quebecois’ rise to power and the wave of a resurgent nationalist politics. The nauseating celebrations that took place on September 4 were not just about tuition hikes being canceled. Who canceled the tuition hikes? The PQ was seemingly the political solution to the CL(ASSE)’s economic demand. It was perfectly fitting for a campaign directed against Charest and his Liberals. This collaboration with the new government was followed by proclamations about “remaining mobilized” and vigilant against the indexing of tuition, etc. These meaningless words were made all the more so when the CL(ASSE) decided to participate in the discussions leading up to the Education Summit announced by the PQ. Now, the CL(ASSE) may backtrack and not participate, only so as to wait for a better opportunity to sit down in government offices. Regardless of whether they do or do not participate in the summit, the aim driving the decision will be identical.
IV.
Implications
As negotiators, the CL(ASSE) acted on the basis that tuition hikes were the source of tension. The strike, the revolt, was reduced to bureaucratic mandates every other weekend. As incisive and broad analyses were widely distributed, read and acted upon, the CL(ASSE) as an institution had no choice but to trudge along in the shackles of its positions and talking points. For the last two years, the ASSÉ had spent all of its time talking about tuition. In the midst of a strike there were relationships and affinities to create. There were skills to learn. There were internalized patterns of oppression and control to struggle against. There were police, banks, state buildings, and other structures of domination to attack. How was, and is, tuition posited as the main point day after day, with brief mentions of an ambiguous social strike as the weak spice to a bland rhetoric?
This rhetoric is sometimes complimented by opposition to ‘trends’ of the university. They say to oppose the ‘corporatization’ or ‘commodification’ of the university. What does this mean? These are not, as the CL(ASSE) would have it, issues, to be addressed by this or that alteration. The university is commodified because the basic unit of capitalism is the commodity. The university is corporatized because the corporate form dominates the market. The university is not, nor can it be, an autonomous institution. The crisis of the university is the crisis of society. If one opposes commodification of the university, oppose the commodity. If one opposes corporatization, oppose the corporation. If one opposes these, oppose that which defends them and maintains their rule.
It is said quite frequently that the strike opened up spaces of possibility. This is true. It is also easy to say. What is more difficult is to articulate the content of those possibilities. Here is a start: the strike was one tactic exposing the potential to transcend, to negate, the conditions which created it.
Student organizing as student is obvious and implicit. Today there is little room for else. Unions are found nearly everywhere. Like other powerful institutions, their utility is resources – to siphon when useful. The point, though, is this self-organization’s impulse towards overcoming the basis for that organization. Struggles to preserve social roles will necessarily remain within the structure which produced them, again and again, no matter how intense the struggle becomes. The maintenance of a role and the relation this implies is vital to the ruling order. Said another way, what generates limits. Pushed to its limit, the condition becomes opportunity.
The process of returning to class (or becoming an itinerant dropout in need of work) is revealing. Coercion is exposed momentarily in all its glory. With no caps and gowns and claims to eternal truths, the threat is clear. In August, universities promised to fail everyone, to cancel the semester. The infamous Loi 12 (Projet de la loi 78) – issued in May – actually worked. The main point was never the protests. It was always to efficiently re-start the universities and Cégeps, and, without exception, they all began again. The government, in suspending the semester – freezing the strike – created the conditions for a return to class. Thousands in Montreal, who desired to continue, were overrun. The CL(ASSE)’s model was the necessary compliment to the state’s.
-Akher
Montreal,
January 2013
The thrust of this critique is not pointed towards individual convictions, ideas and desires. As always, the greater the scope of our generalizations, the more exceptions we leave outside. These are responses to general trends and tendencies observed in the North American anarchist milieu. (United States and Canada – because there is a context that exists that is more than the addition of these two countries, but that is, of course, quite different in Mexico.) It is quite likely that many of these trends do exist elsewhere in the world, as do many products of American culture. That being said, I believe that many of these tendencies are particularly North American, even if their resonance is felt beyond these borders. Many of these statements and points have been said elsewhere, at different times and by different voices. The point lies that critiques ill-heard bear repeating. Will some be offended, feel targeted? I hope that if this is the case, those offended will not take their indignation as an excuse to throw this piece in the garbage, to rail against it. We are already too few, and too isolated. Yet no numbers or figures could be justification for silence. Cooperation and camaraderie in struggle become meaningless if they are conditional on thin-lipped nodding and pats on the back, if they refuse reflection and debate. Forgive the assumption, but we did not become anarchists in an effort to seek support and acceptance on all sides, to paint glue over cracks and inconsistencies. To be cliché, radical means seeking out the roots of any problem, situation, social or political form. If we cannot see aspects of society that are reproduced in our own circles, then any attempt at radical change is hopeless, no matter how large or how militant. That, or the more radical consequences of the anarchist project will be taken up by others before they are taken up by anarchists themselves. Of course, this is already happening, as it has happened before.
Lastly, if your response to this text is merely, ‘but we’re working hard!’ then accept the response that any good boss will give you. ‘Work harder.’
Openings
I.
The anarchist current in North America (esp. the US) has all the trappings of a social movement, without the movement. The what of a social struggle, with little to no conception of the how, or the why. We ask ourselves what makes sense in terms of action and organizational form, with little attention given to the context, or the conditions in which it makes sense to do anything at all. We seek blanket solutions, models and forms, things that could be applied everywhere—and are effective nowhere. We build models for resistance and solidarity, with no concept of how these things could be weapons. We seek answers where there is merely the silent face of the world that confronts us.
We have isolated attacks and acts of sabotage. We have groups supporting those targeted by repression, suspected, charged, convicted and locked up for acts of resistance. Yet even these seem to have shrunk within recent years. We have occasional black blocs and convergences, nearly each time preceding a fallout replete with months of debate and venom over what we call tactics.
And beyond? We have punks serving oddly textured stews in public parks, wondering why on earth people don’t eat their food. We have groups meeting in dingy union offices and campus-based non-profits. We have infoshops in towns and cities all over the place, opening, closing, opening, closing. We have teenagers doing the same things we did five, ten, twenty years ago, and still we are unaware of each other. We had an anti-war movement to try to “push” in a radical direction, and now we don’t even have that. We speak of the necessity of working together with liberals, when we can barely work together amongst ourselves.
We have crew changes, maps and enough hitchhiking stories to fill the Library of Congress. We have armies of friends and houseguests and “do your own dishes” signs above the sink.
Where we could have relationships, we have internet forums. Where we could have meaningful debate, we have mud-slinging. Where we could analyze liberal (and other forms of) dogma, we remain silent, only to talk shit later. Where we could deepen critiques of social movements and struggles, we seek “openness” and “diversity of opinion,” as if liberals will be tricked into becoming anarchists by our non-threatening discourse.
When we could gain understanding and perspective from particular struggles, in North America or abroad, too often we instead find only fetishism. When we could develop techniques with intent, when we could prepare, learn, adapt, and expand upon moments of resistance, we instead rush into ill-defined situations with ill-formed expectations (viz. to view rioting as a tactic, and not an event)—only to repeat the same process at the next opportunity.
We often see theory as a thing of the past. When we could be striving to understand the context we live in, and what it means to us as anarchists, we instead turn to ideas and modes from a hundred years’ past, as if there still exists a labor movement today, or even workers, as such; or, we shut out theory entirely, seeing it as a foreign and near-imperial imposition on “the movement” itself. As if acting without reflection, repetition of certain events and organizing forms, and a proliferation of different groups to address every minor aspect and consequence of the society we live in today, will inevitably drive domination out of our world—like a miracle in kitchen chemistry.
Where we encounter intellectualism, too often we reject it in favor of simplistic and “accessible” dogmas, or embrace it on the assumption that all thought is by nature intellectual—when we could be attacking the ivory tower from a position of thought, reflection, self-critique, and confidence in our own ideas.
Where there is capital, power and repression, we see an ever-growing tide of issues, each one demanding its own unique organized response.
Where issue-based organizing is critiqued, we hear the same response screamed: I will not wait until after your revolution…! As if we must each have our own unique, pre-packaged revolution. As if my revolution is right around the corner. To say that most forms of oppression and exploitation could be eradicated through non-revolutionary means, through mere organizing—or worse yet, advocacy.
After Fredy Villanueva’s murder at the hand of pigs, in the wake of mass rioting in Montréal-Nord, Montréal anarchists sought representatives of local organizations in an effort to build “alliances of solidarity.”
In the absence of solid communities, we create semblances, as if certain events or institutions could make a community; hence taking on the worst characteristics of intentional communities (insularity, distrust or distaste for the “outside world,” self-congratulation and an inflated sense of comfort, protracted internal arguments remaining forever invisible and irrelevant to the uninitiated), nearly always indistinguishable from cults to the outside observer. In so doing, we absorb the colonizer’s mentality of always seeking representatives and forms, ever blind to the thing itself, ignorant of the relations that truly form a community. We find ourselves barely cognizant of one major consequence of modern society, the rabid destruction of communities. All the while shouting no cops in our communities!, but never asking: what community?
We are wordless to speak of alienation, as if weekly meetings and collective houses are some sort of cure-all; no surprise that we grow ever more irrelevant to people who feel the visceral pains of exploitation and self-hatred, whose only answer to their rage is a growing detachment from the world.
We see impassioned comrades disappearing from “the scene,” absorbed in work life or home life, in substances and depression. Or turning to clandestinity, arson and bombings through uncontainable impatience for a self-styled movement that fails to move anything. (Not to dismiss these actions, but the desperation that sometimes motivates them.) And when these rifts are addressed, it is only through reactive measures: support for prisoners and people on trial, mental health collectives, external projects and efforts to “stay in contact” with or support older comrades and those who have left the scene. The notion of solidarity has disappeared, or returns as a mere specter, a word with no weight or substance, much like anti-globalization or people power.
We critique institutions of power through one side of the mouth, with the other speaking of the need to build our own institutions, ignoring the dynamics of power that will infect any institution.
We speak of actions and dynamics at home and in our spaces, always in contrast to what we do as anarchists in the “outside world”—as if we are missionaries to an idea, and must represent this idea to others, as if we must maintain two protocols and two standards, as if we cannot merely be anarchists, and act accordingly.
We speak of eradicating oppression in our communities, as if oppression is created merely by individuals, by choices, behaviors and social dynamics, and not also by capitalism, by cities, by the state and by technology.
We speak of solidarity as a special commodity, reserved for token groups of people, and not a basic and fundamental anarchist principle, essential to all forms and aspects of our struggle.
We speak of many things, often forgetting what it is to listen. We read and read, forgetting that learning is not a matter of social credibility, that anarchism is not a quantity.
We swallow social capital and alienated relations hook, line and sinker, digging ever deeper into our cliques’ private trenches, making a hollow joke out of the word “expansive.” Meanwhile, we dismiss attempts to challenge the way we are socialized to relate and interact as “lifestyle anarchism.” Or we address the issues around relationships and interactions in the most alienated way, through categories and specialized terms, all the while reinforcing the solid walls around our social circles. In so doing, we see “working on dynamics” as a reasonable alternative to struggle. When we reject activism, we so often see cynical hedonism as a reasonable alternative, accepting the rarity of any real anarchist possibilities, and lacking the initiative to create them.
We stand on a precipice over a vast, gaping trench with “the revolution” on the other side, blind to the mass of potentials that stand between “here” and “there.”
On forms
II.
Much ado has been made about the false debate between summit-hopping and local organizing. We find in the end two tendencies each in desperate need of critique.
On the one side, we don’t expect to find anyone who will defend “summit-hopping” as a viable revolutionary strategy in itself. However, the arguments in favor of organizing countersummits and convergences often return to a few points, mainly meeting each other and gaining experience in the streets. The strongest counterpoint is the repression that inevitably surrounds such events.
That being said, there is no strong argument against anarchists meeting each other and acting together. As long as we do not put absolute safety above the impulse to fight against the state, capital and domination in all its forms, there will always be repression. The more potency a struggle gains, the more desperate and vicious the response of the state will be, depending on the means and resources available to it.
Hence, the question becomes less one of convergence, and more of the summit itself. Here is where the bottom falls out. Opposing summits is based on the notion of showing resistance to the state’s plans, to whatever group is meeting, whatever project is being discussed (free trade agreements, WTO, World Bank, economic forums, etc). In anti-globalization mythology, a degree of victory is observed in the moment when summits are organized in remote, easily fortified locations far from metropolitan centers. To wit, they are scared of us. Victory?
And the question morphs again: how difficult is it for world political and financial leaders, arriving in their private planes, to meet in Kananaskis, Alberta, rather than Calgary? Or, how difficult to meet by phone or video conference, rather than in person? Or, how difficult to hold a secret meeting, or a teleconference, in lieu of a publicly announced summit? How difficult to say Plan X is scrapped, and go on to carry out the same plan, only without a name? These things happen all the time. So in the end, what is a meeting in the grand scope of power structures, of capital and the state?
Yet for the permanent traveler, little more is possible than to confront a meeting, to move from convergence to convergence. Even in the absence of summits, any event is in some sense a meeting to one who is always arriving—every impression a first impression, even when revisiting old haunts. A mass of people in perpetual motion is as useless as an isolate community, equal in their failure to become relevant, to develop any sort of force.
And the alternative: local organizing. At first glance, the argument is seductive. But what substance do the oft-repeated critiques of summithopping give us? Infoshops, Food not Bombs, bike co-ops, coalitions with liberal groups and NGOs; in other words, a thousand ways to build a semi-functional “radical” sub-society with pretensions toward autonomy. Building a new world in the shell of the old. Ignoring the fact that the “old world” is far from a shell, that industrial capitalism continues to function, utterly untouched by whatever radical institutions we might build inside of it.
Unfortunately, this discourse on the part of anarchists serves to reinforce the logic that conflictuality is the domain of a specific subcultural group, i.e. young, white, middle-class, male-bodied anarchists. In the name of inclusiveness and anti-oppression politics, the conflictuality of anarchist “others” is erased, as well as that of non-anarchist exploited individuals—a mass that eclipses the North American anarchist milieu, no matter how we look at it.
This discourse also creates the mythology of two types of anarchists. One type, with no engagement whatsoever in social relationships or any particular place, merely lying in wait for the next convergence, the next riot or black bloc call-out, to engage their violent fantasies and write their literary communiqués; the other type, abhorrent of conflict, living in so-called communities, building alternative institutions, and systems of mediation and direct democracy. The first type resembles a kind of inhuman monster; the second type is composed of alleged real people, who actually live somewhere, generally reflecting middle-class values, rendering anarchism palatable to a certain projection of what popular opinion is.
In the end, the whole debate becomes more an impediment to anarchist struggle than anything else.
III.
So what is wrong with local organizing?
This is a loaded question, as the construction of what we call local organizing is itself loaded. In one sense, the answer is quite simple. Nothing is wrong with it. In fact, local organizing is the most important piece of any resistance. It is the only form in which we may act directly from our relationships and experiences, forming collectives in our immediate contexts. Organizing on a larger scale, and over distances, immediately introduces representation, problems of communication, technological mediation, etc. Any action becomes more complicated, any process more difficult.
In this sense, the critique is levelled not toward the pure notion of local organizing in itself, but the paradigm of local organizing as a nonconflictual, directly democratic, charity-oriented endeavor (even as we hear the screams, solidarity not charity!). To fill this frame, we have the usual anarchist social services of Food not Bombs, community bike shops and Really Really Free Markets; then we get into the less charity-oriented projects such as co-op bars and cafés, collective houses and autonomous camps, which permit us to supposedly create direct democracy now, destroy hierarchy in our immediate lives, or even live anarchy. But let us dig a little deeper. Is it true that we really do want local organizing, only in a more pointed, antagonistic form?
And here we stumble upon the other problem. It is not a problem with the local itself, but with localism. By this we mean a fetishism with one’s local context, an obsession with its uniqueness, a drive to organize an authentic struggle from that place, for that place. It is the notion of fighting where you stand taken to an extreme, in which one shuts out influences from the outside world, ignoring the forms of resistance practiced in other parts of the world. It fits nicely with the sustainability discourse: eat local, buy local, etc. To wit, if one can build up a cooperative, self-sufficient community, it would be effectively liberated from the state’s machinations.
The logic can be expanded somewhat, to counter the critique of isolation. A federation of autonomous communities, each one populated by horizontal institutions, groups of people taking care of each others’ needs, be it in terms of physical health, mental health, food, shelter, transportation. Bike co-ops next to community gardens, next to herbalist collectives, mental health support centers, and so on. Communication networks set up between these communities, to share information and knowledge. Finally, the vision becomes a somewhat expanded, more institutionalized version of the anarchist scene already existing in North America. Or, a slightly radicalized version of the “fifty mile diet.”
Underlying this notion of localism, even in the expanded federationist localism, is the assumption that the state and capital can be erased by eliminating our dependence on their infrastructure. One would do well to recall that long before the state became as entrenched in our everyday lives as a dispensary of services, it still profited from land, labor and the lives of its subjects through taxation, slavery, war, conscription, mining, fishing, forestry, and myriad forms of extortion—and that in many places in the world, this feudal relationship still exists to a large degree. As much in prison labor as in the “Third World.”
Here we find the limit of localism as a radical discourse, at the precise point in which solidarity and struggle disappear from the lexicon of a certain anarchist milieu. Localism draws force from a misuse of certain radical ideas. The notion of revolt as therapy, articulated by situationists (viz. the absence of suicide in May ‘68 Paris), inverted and distorted into a pure discourse of mental and physical health. To see subsistence and “being autonomous” as revolt is little different from seeing self-therapy as revolt. To the contrary, communities of revolt on a certain level must be communities of support, but this doesn’t mean that communities of support are by nature revolutionary.
Communities of squatters and punks are as prone to narrowing the scope of resistance as Eat Local advocates. “Resist to exist”’ as a rallying call gives up all potency when resistance becomes solely focused on the protection and maintenance of certain spaces—spaces which are only radical insofar as they act as springboards toward exterior struggle, and toward radical transformation of the individuals who participate in them (and radical transformation cannot be tied to a certain space, or a certain scene).
The anarchist project is one of constant dialogue between one’s own position, and the world beyond. From the individual body, to the relations between individuals, the communities we form, the cities we live in, to the political boundaries that surround us and divide the world, to the world entire. The problem of localism is not with putting energy into one’s local context, but with a preoccupation for a certain scale, a fetishism for a certain context. As individuals who wish to eradicate domination at every scale and in every corner of the world, knowing that different manifestations of authority are interactive and interdependent, that power does not stop at borders and boundaries—we must recognize the futility of overcoming power in certain places or forms, as much in discourse as in action. Not to suggest that it is impossible to win some level of autonomy, to prevail in certain conflicts in one space; but that as long as capital and power still operate globally, any liberated space (even a country or continent) will always be threatened and attacked from without, as long as armed power structures still exist in the world.
We find the relevance of locality to anarchist struggle, while avoiding the traps of localism. The places we find ourselves, the relations we develop, the familiar alleys and fire escapes, the people we recognize on the street. Deepening connections and familiarities, developing affinities into modi operandi for action, these are building blocks for resistance. Without falling into the commonly Marxian mythology of an international revolution, we must be international in thrust, even as we develop our capacities to fight locally.
This means being enemies of power everywhere as we contest its manifestations around us. This means insofar as we interest ourselves in issues and events elsewhere in the world, we find and attack the myths and discourses of authority in those places (viz. Venezuela as proletarian paradise). It means finding deep affinities with forms of resistance in other places. Without creating chauvinistic standards, like saying that only self-identified anarchists are worthy of solidarity, it means breaking down double standards all too common in left and anarchist milieus, in which resistance group X in the “Global South” deserves our solidarity without an examination of their politics (and thus moving down the vague and slippery slope of anti-imperialism as a faux-ideology).
IV.
As North American anarchists fall into traps of liberal representation and misguided attempts to understand other cultures, notions of revolutionary solidarity (fundamental to anarchist practice) stretch farther into the distance.
As far as this relates to international solidarity, we can find countless examples. Support for and excitement following the “Arab Spring” while barely looking beyond mainstream sources and the media narrative of events. Sending cash to Stalinist groups in Oaxaca to aid the struggle, when anarchist groups exist but are simply less well-known. Uncritical support of Zapatistas or the landless workers’ movement in Brazil. The at-times fetishistic support for any resistance movement in so-called developing countries can be compared, if not traced, to the anti-globalization movement narrative of a “movement of movements,” a loose, yet interconnected array of social movements against neoliberal capitalist reforms, spread across the world. This illusion, largely purveyed by the Academy and lefty Western publishing houses, paints a picture of collaboration between vastly different groups and milieus who have nothing to do with each other, typically have not encountered each other, and may even be unaware of each other’s existence despite their apparent association. In addition to drawing lines on paper between unrelated struggles, this narrative paints with a broad brush a spectrum of groups ranging from anarchists to authoritarian leftists to apologists for a glorified pre- 1980’s capitalism. Depending on whose narrative we follow, this grouping may include many nationalists, including conservative and right-wing nationalists.
Even where there have been international encounters of anti-globalization groups and movements, little has ever suggested that these would not be easily recuperated by a reformist, “pro-democracy” milieu, eager to draw nationalism and industrial development into their arsenal, flipping the coin of US imperialism to find the same structures on the other side. It is not too surprising that the Left would seek to paint this picture of a broad and meaninglessly vague global movement against certain facets of modern capitalism. But for anarchists to fall for it? Really? The global economic equivalent of “anybody but Bush”?
The examples of vague “developing world” solidarity are the most prevalent and clear, but even in the West, even in North America we find the same phenomenon. As the recent 2012 Quebec student strike was happening, solidarity actions occurred in a number of US and Canadian cities; but what did they cling to? The casserole demonstrations, a theme copied from Chile where people came out on their balconies and banged on pots and pans to express dissent during the dictatorship. These actions quickly morphed into street marches full of people banging pots in various Montréal neighborhoods, and were specifically endorsed by a Liberal government minister as an admirable form of dissent. So, North American radicals copy the most iconic and media-friendly action in the whole strike, the one which served most to pacify the streets of Montreal. Solidarity with who?
Or the notion that “sometimes nationalism is acceptable.” Like a population that has been oppressed is right to want their own State. Again, anarchists fall into the schoolyard logic of “justice” and “righting wrongs,” ignoring the evidence that State apparatuses and nationalist formations always involve repression, coercion and exclusion, that these are not consequences of “right” or “wrong” but are intrinsic to these social structures.
Solidarity is only possible knowing where one stands. If being anarchist is to each person to define, then solidarity is to each person to define, and between us it means nothing. To participate in a movement or struggle, or to contribute to a certain group or alliance, without a clear analysis of where one stands in that context, and how contributing to that group or struggle will aid one’s own struggle—this is charity. It is “doing a good thing,” and fits neatly in the construct of the responsible citizen.
Revolutionary solidarity is many things. It is writing to prisoners and supporting people facing repression, as much as it is direct attacks on the state and systems of repression, as much as it is communication (beyond anarchist circles) about anarchist struggle and repression. Not one of these is complete without the others. Revolutionary solidarity cannot be a purely defensive endeavor, nor one of support only, anymore than a revolutionary project in itself can be composed of merely defense and support.
V.
An anarchist movement—does it exist, can it exist?
The question lies on the tail of another question: what is a social movement? Like many questions of definition, it is subjective, and whole books could be and have been written on it. Yet at the same time, the answer seems deceptively simple. A social movement is a popular current that manifests in some way against the society we inhabit, and for a different kind of society. It is not an isolated group, armed or not; it is not a religion; it is not a political party.
To be clear: there exist two common notions of social movement. On the one hand are issue-based, time-specific social movements, against certain wars, against new laws, for certain specific rights (pro-choice, anti-CPE, etc). Such a movement could last a week or it could last forty years; its limits are not in time, but in the achievement of a specific end, or the exhaustion of will to fight for that end. In contrast are social movements with ongoing ends that cannot be achieved with a few concessions, in effect without broad social change—against patriarchy, against poverty, for the free movement of migrants. Of course, there are many groups and individuals, activists and theorists, in North America who attach themselves to these ideas. Yet a social movement requires not merely awareness of an issue or conflict, but active, visible opposition, and a certain degree of currency within the society in question.
The notion of an anarchist social movement often runs hand in hand with the attempt to show that anarchist values are values common in society, that we need to build bridges and show our true positive intentions to people, removing any hint of threat or danger, in order to dispel negative associations people have with anarchists as unruly, murderous, and without morals.
We do not do ourselves any favors in this way. While perhaps mutual aid and solidarity are things many people could relate to on some level, they are certainly not defining characteristics of our society. The opposite is far more true. Cheating, mutual exploitation and economic self-interest prevail—in material practices, if not always in word. The allure of wealth pervades every institution, so that poor and working people often identify more with the values of the rich than with those of their own class.
When we look at other anarchist notions, the disparity grows even wider. We are against private property, against control and repression, against colonization, against prisons, against work. These ideas are not reconcilable with the social order we live in. Sharing is taught to kids, and this may reflect certain anarchist practices—but so does expropriation.
The sooner we can give up illusions of what we are, and what support we have, the sooner we can determine who we really are, and where we stand. Surpassing idealized visions of bringing more and more masses into our circles, anarchists would do well to learn who their comrades are, and what they are capable of together. In the intense internal criticism that pushes toward accomodating a broader population, cowering at the mere thought of alienating the so-called public, one recalls the fin-de-siècle idea of propaganda by the deed. Through uncompromising attacks on this society of domination, a clear position is expressed; ideas are explored that would remain inert and seemingly impossible from the vantage of a tamed, orderly, polite social movement. The solidarity inspired by such acts is not one of words, but of more tangible sentiments, of a fluid interplay between empathy and acts of defiance.
Rebels hiding in the midst of this society, our ideas will never be accepted before the destruction of the social order around us. Yet the point is not to isolate ourselves or overemphasize the differences between anarchists and other segments of society, anymore than to erase existing differences in an attempt to merge our struggle with a much larger, more fluid and undefined milieu of “opposition.” We must be precise in our reflections, in knowing what we want, and how we may act toward such ends—in the immediate as much as in the long-term. For radical ideas to spread, we must be honest to ourselves about our positions, and clear to potential comrades about all we stand for, and why. Freed of the baggage of an illusory movement, for the free discussion of ideas, the sharing of techniques, and the initiative to move forward with what we have—so we may begin, once more.
VI.
If anarchists do not form a movement, then what? A school, a flock, a herd? A cult, a sect, a private club? A clique, a gang? A subculture?
The question is slightly complicated, in that there are many anarchists in North America who are not associated or implicated in its anarchist subculture, participating in its events and institutions. Likewise, in many places, the anarchist blends and blurs on the edges with punk, traveler, lefty activist, radical queer and various other identities or subcultures. Nevertheless, there is an anarchist subculture, with its houses, infoshops, benefit shows, convergences, Food not Bombs, and other projects.
Beyond its spaces and events, like any other subculture, the anarchist version carries a great deal of conventions, forms of behaving and interacting, rituals, assumptions, slang and specialized language, expected appearance. When challenged, these institutions are typically defended by attachment, by a certain feeling of comfort, a desire to feel at home and safe in our houses—much the same reasons for which many people work, watch TV, stay in relationships they question, maintain the same group of friends, never alter their sexuality after age eighteen.
Yet even as anarchists create certain spaces and uphold certain ways of relating for the same reasons as others do on their end, we have the added benefit of thinking our way of establishing these is revolutionary, that such codified practices steer us toward some kind of liberation.
Strangely, where the anarchist subculture is defended, it is often done so in the framework of organizing from within vs. attacking from without, maintaining one’s role in the system vs. abandoning it completely, to then act on one’s own autonomously from it. In this sense, living on welfare, dumpster diving, scamming, and squatting are seen to constitute one’s liberation from “the system”, and staying at home for days, or seeing the same friends around all the time at shows and political events, are seen to constitute one’s autonomy from “mainstream society.” Hence we arrive at revolutionary praxis as neatly pre-packaged deal, complete with a new socialization to cover up the first one.
Here, lines of flight are not uncharted adventures of individuals heading for the stars on stolen wings. These are paths clearly drawn, known distances, lines already mapped out, an easy trek from one’s previous life to the anarchist scene, with loads of beckoning hands on the other side. Or perhaps scowls, most often depending on first impressions, on how likely is a candidate to fit in.
At the end of this “flee to attack from afar” discourse, we find ourselves failing at both. The flight of the subculture is not one of destroying limits and stagnation, breaking down social categories and patterns of behavior within ourselves, or pulling apart alienated social relations—a total negation of the repressed, scarred, socialized self. Instead, it flees the context and places of mainstream alienation, in order to reproduce similar dynamics, similar feelings of guilt and silence, similar chopped-up ways of interacting, only with an altered vocabulary and a fresh set of boundaries. Hence we abandon the places where we might share ideas, inspire and be inspired, to live on a cloudy plain above the city, only to submit to many of the same self-destructive dynamics we originally fled. And when it comes time to attack from afar, more often than not, this amounts to a mob of rowdy strangers shouting gibberish from the limit of the square, quite incomprehensible to anyone who happens to pass by.
In the end, the question ought not be whether to flee to attack from afar, or to remain amidst ranks of society to share tools and attack from within it; but rather, how to perform either or both to effect? From where can we hit our targets; and get away? From where, and how, can we not just attack physically, but share the techniques, the rage, the reasons and wishes behind them? And where, and how, can we attack and break down the harmful relics of socialization we still carry within us, as one more facet of an insurgence against all forms of domination? To pursue these questions to their ends, without imposing a frame already over them, cannot be done within the confines of a subculture. These are questions that demand finally the abandon and destruction of subcultures, as surely as of society itself with all its pressures and cages.
This is not to say that the anarchist subculture is completely useless on all sides. Yet it is not merely the sum of its parts. To reject society does not mean destroying every person, every relationship, every ritual or practice that composes it; to wish to destroy capital does not mean the destruction of all tools, resources and homes, the scorching of the earth’s land, as all currently exist in the form of private property. Likewise, to wish destruction on the anarchist subculture is not for the loss or closing of all its resources, its spaces, its materials; the ending of all relationships developed in that context; the forgetting of skills gained; the deterioration of ties between comrades in different areas. It is to wish the destruction of this subculture as a structure and a context, in order to liberate all contained within from its confines and limits. And certain components—skills to design and produce propaganda, to speak indecipherably, to eat for free, to spot pigs, are valuable outside of a subcultural context. When they are understood and used with intent, all are tools that may aid us in our struggles; when practiced unintentionally or out of silent coercion, they become merely another set of alienating, self-reproducing rituals.
On the role of critique
VII.
It is not particularly out of pleasure that we launch such an expansive critique. We consider it a thing of necessity, though equally necessary to recognize the limits of this perspective. Critique and self-reflection are valuable, but they can only go so far. Too much critique is more likely to stifle than to inspire, no matter how well-reasoned the criticisms. Writing always fits into a game of power. By necessity it takes positions, places itself at certain points within existing conflicts. We are always prodding certain spots, pushing eyes to look in certain directions, opening holes to peer into, exposing contradictions; unless, of course, one tries to please all, but then this is not writing, and rather wallowing. We hope here to attack two forms: the activist tendency against thought and toward action, and the intellectual’s toward thought and away from action.
At the end of the day, proactive ideas, examples and proposals will yield more than pure criticism. Yet we do not live in a vacuum of purely positive action. We cannot say that all actions and all ideas are equal, that “everything helps,” that everything we don’t disagree with is a concrete step towards what we want. Failed attempts do not bear repeating; stagnant forms of organizing do not demand our energy. Ingrown scenes that fail to communicate beyond their borders will not grow by some act of magic.
Hence the need for critique.
Clearly there are many positive examples we can learn from. This is by no means intended to displace the value of lessons to be learned from existing and past anarchist struggles and strategies, insurrections and lesser forms of social rupture. Only, better to take the lessons from the actions of others with a clear view of ourselves, and where we stand. No formation, no matter how courageous, how militant, how organized, ought to be exempt from critique and reflection. Even in hotspots of anti-authoritarian struggle, there are mistakes, failures, and internal conflicts as much as in the tamest North American city. The difference is not in some more advanced or more perfect anarchists, but in the courage and desire to act, self-organize, learn, adapt, and spread sentiments and tactics, free of nostalgia and unwarranted attachment to failing strategies. Finally, the hope is that something said once, and well, is worth more than a thousand pieces of ideas coming out in different places at different times, forever leaving something to be amended. Though of course, no matter how thorough we might like to be, nothing is ever complete.
On futures
VIII.
Where can we go from here? What paths draw out into the abyss, dovetailing toward insurrections, revolutions, space to breath and think, communities where we can be ourselves, without fear of pigs or perpetrators, relations strong enough to hold the torrent of our desires?
As anarchists we cannot reject these bigger notions, these more distant articulations of a world free of domination. And yet to linger too long on these horizons, we run ever the greater risk of drowning, or drifting so far beyond this world that we lose sight of land. We mustn’t grow too lost in our utopian fantasies that we lose the ability to communicate, to relate, to collaborate with those whose views differ from our own, however slightly or greatly. Yet neither can we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of realism and practicality, sacrificing values for a handful of change, a slightly better wage, a less murderous police state, a prison cell to oneself.
This goes merely to describe one tension that we live as anarchists, whether we choose to own up to it or not. It does not offer us anything, beyond the space opened for reflection. It is the same as with any purely negative critique; there is no prescription, no list of possible actions. Such a critique merely opens space to breath where have lived illusions, repetitions, false notions of satisfaction or progress. Yet to overcome such obstacles is already an accomplishment.
However, nothing stops here. In dispelling an attachment to ineffectual tactics, it is up to us to surpass them. The desire for an uncompromising, inspired and courageous anarchist struggle is nothing if it stops at the production of text. To make more of it requires complicity, shared passion, a willingness to act. It demands also a desire for the struggle to grow, spread, find allies and accomplices. In this sense, complicity is not limited to relations between individuals, nor to collaboration among anarchists. This is a big part of it, but it also means that we collectively, as anarchists, may seek out accomplices in our struggles against domination, the state and capital.
What does this mean? Is this not already common practice? It might seem. However, by seeking complicity outside of a certain political strain, we don’t mean anarchists joining mainstream activist or community groups, or seeking allies in leftist or reformist organizations. For anarchists to work with organizations only serves to reinforce the notion of anarchists as activists, as political specialists, removed and distant from the everyday lives of proletarians, immigrants, indigenous, marginalized people generally. To struggle for the exploited, while removing oneself from their (and our own) day-to-day life, is to reproduce the same kind of representation we see in the media and in politics, while drifting always farther from concrete practices of autonomy and solidarity.
More concretely: for anarchists to seek complicity outside their circles in struggles against police or surveillance, in sabotage of pay-booths, in attacking development projects, is to recognize a common interest in living safe from police violence and repression, a common desire not to be watched everywhere, a desire not to pay always more and more to go work, study or visit friends or family; a desire not to be surrounded always by more rich people, paying higher rents, facing more frequent patrols, increased vigilance against graffiti, loitering, drug use, soliciting, or the simple crimes of being young, poor, of color, or in some way a sore thumb sticking out of the developer’s vision of a safe, clean, proper city.
In this way, complicity means recognizing that much of society is oppressive, alienating and hateful to many people in this world; that it doesn’t require an anarchist as Platonic hero to “see the light of truth.” And recognizing that many of the things we love, the autonomy and self-determination we hunger for so fervently, are not bizarre fetishes uniquely valued by anarchists.
Solidarity means finding these complicities, these points of tension where exist already partisans beyond our own circles. At the same time, it means not stretching the anti-authoritarian elements that exist outside of politicized scenes into broad fictions, telling ourselves that people are intrinsically anarchist, or anti-capitalist, and just don’t realize it. We cannot hide from the fact that, although in certain contexts we may find many sympathetic to anarchist analysis or tactics, in the bigger picture many if not most people are hostile to revolutionary ideas. Yet to turn inward, to avoid communicating beyond anarchist or other counter-cultural scenes, is the worst mistake. We may seek accomplices where we can, and assert anti-authoritarian perspectives where they are not already a known quantity (with a willingness to explain and defend them), all the while deepening the affinities we have, and acting together.
Compare these notions to another example, in which a radical environmental group composed mainly of anarchists, attempting to expand its base of support in a certain campaign, makes links to various mainstream environmental groups who are opposing the same timber sale. In content, it is similar: anarchists fighting against a certain project going beyond their own scene to build allies for the struggle. However, this interaction occurs entirely in the political sphere, between organizations and people already aligned, already “politically active” in one way or another. The possibility for this struggle to spill out of the “activist” sphere, to grow and spread, to become conscious of its strength, to find new terrains of struggle, or to directly confront the state and capital in themselves—is effectively nil.
Of course, an encompassing social revolution is a terribly distant and unlikely possibility. Without completely renouncing our desire for it, we have to face our tangible context, and work with the reality we live in. (Even in a more revolutionary context, we could not ignore the deep rifts that exist among anarchists—to wit, it is not any anti-state social revolution that will yield the world in which we wish to live, though greater explanation is beyond the scope of this critique.) Jokes about “the rev” may be funny for a while, but self-denigrating humor is rarely constructive in the long run. Faced with the seemingly monolithic impossibility of revolution, we often fall into either pessimistic apathy, nihilist abandon, or a compromised notion of struggle as damage control—complete with a cognitive dissonance to ignore the futility of combating domination on the whole through a proliferation of reforms and safe spaces.
Alternately, the impassioned insurrectionist, disillusioned with an anarchist current that has already given up, turning to arson, bombings, armed struggle; perhaps inspired by Jensen’s philosophy in which a small number of people, skilled, intelligent and capable of carrying out “strategic actions” can bring down civilization by themselves. We don’t think a small number of people, no matter how skilled or dedicated, can face and defeat the state, capitalism, or civilization by themselves. However, the widespread activist discourse that tags armed struggle as desperate, isolationist, and doomed to fail, serves only to create further divisions and enforce our sense of weakness. It says we are not ready yet, we do not have a strong enough movement to support armed groups or arson. Yet we don’t ask the question, how a “movement” that refuses combativeness beyond the occasional counter-summit or black bloc (and even then…), will ever become strong enough to support armed actions? And how does this differ from the sleeping Marxists, ever still waiting for the revolution?
IX.
The question stands. What directions remain toward ends that we desire as anarchists? And to formulate a more preliminary question: if there is no path straight to a world free of domination, what directions lead toward an expansive struggle, toward relations that fulfill us, not in isolation from society but in conflict with it, toward actions that identify the structures of domination, and not merely some bad apples; toward a force that opposes and attacks the state and capital, patriarchy and privilege, alienation and representation—not in certain forms that appear new or more atrocious, but in all their forms; toward an assault that is an open invitation, but not a compromise?
At base, we need an orientation toward and desire to fight. A desire to build struggle out of broad lines of opposition, a willingness to express anti-authoritarian critiques; neither hiding radical ideas in a patronizing effort to work with other groups, nor an elitist clique-based tendency to act only with other anarchists, excluding those “not radical enough,” even from discussion. There is no anarchist movement as such, and we are better without the hopes contained in such illusions. The notion of building a widespread movement is a perfect self-defeating strategy. Instead, we might focus on spreading revolt.
Covering the streets with anarchist propaganda, with ink, paint, and glue, with words that express the fullness of a struggle against domination, that are comprehensible and free of academic and subcultural jargon. As well, messages that emphasize existing social tensions and render them impossible to ignore, that express solidarity with the exploited and excluded, and that urge on self-organization, autonomy and conflict with the dominant classes.
Production and diffusion of texts to inspire revolt and class antipathy, expose and underline structures of domination and oppression, and give tools and ideas for resistance and sabotage. Diffusion: not just anarchist websites, infoshops, and pseudo-radical spaces, but also métros, buses, schools, cafés, fast food joints, bookstores, libraries, street fairs, markets, places of work. As long as the thrust of radical propaganda is join us (at the infoshop, at the demo, etc.), we are forever in a position of weakness, burdened by the same curse as the panhandler or OXFAM solicitor. We are not seeking conscripts or recruits, but comrades in struggle. Here we speak of text, but the same ideas can and ought be applied to other media: music, photos, art, and video.
Willingness to act within moments of revolt or popular aggression against property, police, the architecture of the city, the state, etc., not as distant supporters but as accomplices in the shared desire to destroy what makes us miserable—and hence, to understand solidarity not as a vague term but as a tangible bond.
Desire and preparedness to intervene in broader social movements and struggles, strikes, occupations, mass demonstrations, blockades—not as mute supporters and allies, but as anarchists—interested in the growth and strength of such movements, with our own interests, critiques, strategies and tactics to share. And simultaneously, learning to act as anarchists in the absence of social movements, creating and pushing conflict and self-organization in periods of low struggle, avoiding the trap of playing reformist in order to build a social movement.
To organize with broader groups of individuals to oppose specific developments or projects, on the condition of permanent conflictuality against the project, of no negotiations with the state, strong stances against police intervention, against collaboration, against snitching, and in solidarity with individuals targeted for repression, imprisoned, etc. To challenge widespread anti-neoliberal and anti-globalization perspectives, take apart myths of a better capitalist past, to defend the facts that exploitation, colonialism and ecological devastation are nothing new, that revamped state regulations and “green” business will not serve to create a free, just or sustainable world—and that the DIY, self-styled autonomous version of these ideas is little better, offering us some pieces of a theorized “post-capitalist” world, with no notions of how to create such a world.
To study the proper use of a sledgehammer, the specific fragility of machines and materials, the futility of too few eyes spread too thin to effectively watch anything, in face of a patient, practiced opposition. To spread techniques and tools for sabotage and expropriation, attacking the properties of the rich, bosses, gentrifiers, developers, and other scum. To attack property and capital, the state and its police, with all the means available to us—as much in the virtual realm as the physical, as much in actions as discourses, as much in hidden offices as the streets, as much in words and passion as in tooth and claw, fire and paint, poison and brick.
To fight patriarchy, white supremacy and other forms of racial hierarchy, sexual norms and other abject features of our socialization; these things via direct confrontation, in communication, and in self-reflection, never forgetting the self-destructive consequences of guilt. To know that destroying systems of domination cannot pass by tacit agreement to a uniform code of certain anti-oppressive behaviors, that there is no “free” system to replace a system of exploitation, no laws that liberate to replace laws that coerce. Creating informal hierarchies of awareness and sensitivity serves largely to build higher walls around already isolated cliques, when fighting any coercive structure, internal or external, requires thought and exploration, time and will.
To break down barriers of insecurity and discomfort, codes of behavior and presentation, the self-loathing and judgment that we are socialized into, that exist as much in radical scenes as in mainstream society. Accounting for the coercion that defines “normal” self-expression, we see the openings to act differently, to define our social and individual lives, our personae and possibilities. Seeing the madness and courage that lie on the fringes of our social relations, leaping into risk and the unknown with a hunger to rip through limits previously accepted, as easily questioned as destroyed.
In being willing to be vulnerable, breaking down barriers within ourselves, building relationships where we can grow stronger together, in support and critique, in ideas and action. Recognizing that force and confidence do not come from the ease of patterns and habits, the comforts of predictable relationships where “everything is fine,” the pleasures of shallow compliments and meaningless connections—but from the raw, uncontainable desire to communicate, the knowledge that sheer honesty and unflinching debate are in the end so much more than a thousand forms of consensus, that such communications are a natural bridge into acting.
The joy in bursting subordinate roleplay is contagious—tearing out of the roles and frames we’ve been conditioned to revisit all our lives—not only in explicitly submissive roles, as the whole game requires a great deal of internalized repression, even in the role of leader or dominant. Deep relations may blur the bounds of individuals, while never making us weaker, ever combating the armed categories of friendship and love relations—the shallow choices and limits society offers us for lasting affinities, categories which will not disappear merely because we wish it.
In seeing technology manifest as a social relation, and innovation as a form of constructed dependency; breaking down barriers of mediated interaction; building affinities, community, solidarity and struggle out of real physical space and relating; but not as a rejection of the hardware itself (even if many of us would like that), and all the while maintaining that we ought use all tools at our disposal as long as they are useful.
Entering the debate over social media’s role in struggle, not to vote or choose sides, but to demolish the entire context in which such questions arise. Knowing that new technologies can be useful to resistance, yet always contesting the tyranny of necessity, that the ends sought through certain means may always be pursued through other channels, that usefulness can only go so far, and that a framework of domination does not cease to dominate when it becomes a tool for insurgents.
Toward the establishment and proliferation of spaces, not for the pure quantity of such spaces, nor to reinforce the ubiquitous image of an imaginary “anarchist movement,” but as space to discuss, to share ideas and techniques, to meet each other, to connect different struggles and circles, to render public radical ideas and critiques, beyond the limited space of people who already know each other. Not for some pure value of anarchists knowing other anarchists, but for the affinities, the acts and initiatives that may come out of such encounters.
To recognize that anarchist space is neither limited nor defined by names, signs, numbers, rent paid or square footage; that physical space has a use, much as webspace, or newspaper space, but that what is sought is space opened between individuals, space created for sharing and strengthening of ideas, sharpening of skills, forming of complicities and acting, alone and together, in armed defiance to the world. Such space cannot be measured or counted, and can only be known by the force of sentiment we unearth in ourselves.
To openly discuss and debate different tendencies and tensions among anarchists, abandoning the election-hall farce of attempting to convince or convert the other, and finding common ground where we can, without lumping all into the “big tent” that blunts the edge of all disagreements, creating false notions of consensus.
To recognize that even if today we shirk risks, seek pleasure and the familiar, and assure ourselves in the necessity of certain roles and forms of support—that anarchist struggle is ultimately not a creature of comfort, that opposing domination demands courage, and that context is only relevant insofar as we fail to change it—but that changing one’s context is not the same thing as erasing or ignoring it, pretending that historical conditions are purely mythical, pretending that any action in any place at any time is the full depth of an anarchist approach to resistance.
To move beyond the realization of failures, to imagine and create forms of resistance we desire, to bulldoze the inhibitions that keep us back— from who we want to be, how we want to act, the relations we wish to have, the new forms of self-organization before unseen and unimagined, the flames of revolt appearing in new colors and places, the cackles of an unrepentant will to liberty bouncing between the empty shells of skyscrapers.
Ever deeper into the night, the moon gazing down on free-willed insurgents dancing on a graveyard of old contracts and the rotten hulks of a thousand faces of domination—humans learning to become wolves.
“The moment where we take back our lives, where we free ourselves from morality, fear, and the identities imposed on us. It cannot be stopped by a negotiation table, nor a ballot box. It isn’t the beginning of a movement nor will it die with a movement: It is to be alive, free, and wild!”
This issue is for all those who have weathered repression this last year.
For all the strong hearts willing to put their freedom on the line.
The strike begins: February 2012
On solidarity with “social movements” – open letter to anarchists / The occupation of Cégep du Vieux Montréal
March
Student action and demonstration against police / Wild demo, citizen-cops, solidarity with the Innu, and the pigs’ revenge / March 15 fucks up the cops
April
Actions and confrontations / Plan Nord – Plan Mort / The revolution will not be quiet
May
Anti-capitalist May Day / The battle of Victoriaville / Smoke bombs in the metro / La loi spéciale, on s’en câlisse! / An anarchist perspective on Bill 78 / May 22 / Imaginary “casseurs”. Ninjas vs. Pirates / Solidarity means attack
June, July, August
The spectacle begins / On pacifism…debunking some widely held ideas / Claim for railroad sabotage / Attack against police. G20 repression. August 1 / Le Pavé / Convergence for the Rentrée
Afterword
Action chronology from 2008-2011
Print 8.5 x 11″ | PDF (formatted by Sprout Distro)
Contents:
A few reflections on the GAMMA squad
Word on the street is, there’s a new police squad in Montreal called GAMMA – short for “Guet des activités et des mouvements marginaux et anarchistes” – whose goal is to investigate and repress anarchist and marginal movements. The following is a series of reflections on this development from a few anarchists. Needless to say, it’s not meant to be representative, but is rather our own analysis of this situation, and can hopefully stimulate some discussion amongst our various circles.
We understand the GAMMA squad to be a sign of the state adapting its strategy not only to an increasing amount of attacks against it, but also to a broader context of increasing austerity, and therefore of potential rebellions to come. Its ultimate goal, of course, is the maintenance of social control, necessary for the preservation of this system.
Why GAMMA?
The new squad is part of the “Specialized Investigations” division of the SPVM, which is the umbrella group that has organized crime as one of its focuses. Taking a cue from how the police investigate street gangs, mafia, and the bikers, GAMMA has a mission to profile and accumulate information on the actions, interests, and lifestyles of people considered anarchist or marginal, and so specifically targets anyone who questions the dominant social order.
Why, then, a specialized squad to target anarchists? There are several reasons that we can think of. One the one hand, this is the state’s attempt at shaping the discourse around anarchist ideas and actions. By using the media to single out anarchists, the state tries to personify the anarchist as a dangerous terrorist and asks the population to become pre-emptive snitches in order to protect themselves from this supposed menace. An example of this sort of discourse put into practice is the citizen-snitches during and after the English riots this August, organizing vigilante squads, taking cell-phone photos, and calling in toll-free numbers to denounce the rioters. In casting the anarchist as “the dangerous other”, the specter of GAMMA hopes to draw a clear dividing line between those who are anarchists and will therefore be criminalized, and everyone else (who presumably doesn’t want to be criminalized) – a sort of classic divide and conquer, separate and box in. This is meant to discourage everyone else from getting any ideas about rebelling themselves, of identifying with the rebels, because they just may. Because in reality this line is a blurry one, and the desire to fight this social order is by no means unique to “the anarchists”, so in doing this the state is attempting to paint a line over already stormy, ever-shifting waters.
By creating a squad with this intention, the state is contributing to the maintenance of social control that capitalist society needs in order to function. In fact, it is physically impossible for the police to be everywhere at once – they can’t be everywhere all the time. They can try to get around this fact by installing all sorts of other technology of control – surveillance cameras on every corner, wiretapping phones, mapping out networks through facebook and twitter, store anti-theft detectors, ID cards, biometrics, collecting people’s DNA, x-ray machines at customs, flying drones over borders, the threat of prison – but the key element of social control is our own internalization of it, ie. the cop inside our head. It is the residue of the fear that they create. In the end, police squads like GAMMA accomplish as much through the ghost of their possible presence, as through their actual physical existence.
Of course, there is also a material logic to the creation of GAMMA. It appears to be a bureaucratic re-organization of police forces in order to more efficiently collect and process information about our struggles. They are focusing on anarchists and consolidating their databases to try to better understand patterns and draw links between distinct events.
Repression more broadly, and a rejection of the discourse of “rights”
GAMMA can only be understood by looking at the role repression plays more broadly. Repression has always been an integral part of the functioning of the state. Every state has at its foundation the monopoly on organized violence which it expresses through its laws, its police and its prisons. It therefore isn’t surprising to see the police trying to repress a struggle that has as its honest intention the total negation of the state.
Likewise, political profiling has always existed. Liberals like to boast about how we have freedom of speech, and that other one – freedom of thought. As long as ideas remain exclusively in the realm of just ideas, we have these “freedoms”. As soon as people start to put their ideas into practice, however, and when these challenge the dominant social order, repression suddenly makes itself felt and these freedoms fade into a quickly distant memory, echoed in the walls of the Toronto East detention centre, in Pinochet’s torture chambers, in the ruins of Warsaw, and in the sandy cemeteries of Afghanistan.
The rights that constitute this democratic state are compromises that are offered us in exchange for the maintenance of social peace (ie the absence of rebellion) and our obedience in the face of this system of misery. Within the discourse of rights is implicit the need for the police, the laws and the state to exist, to protect them. In reality, however, as soon as state power is threatened, rights rapidly disappear. To quell the uprisings in England, the government imposed a state of exception. Prime Minister Cameron ordered the police to use all the tools at their disposal in order to reestablish order – to do whatever it takes. The law was on their side. As soon as order was transgressed, democracy turned tyrannical. It started to look like scenes from a science fiction movie. The police symbolized the limits of the possible.
In our context, rights are often invoked in a moral way, a mythology to which people can refer to, the glorious constitution and such. We argue that rights are a concept that can, like all language, change its meaning, application, and intentions, and can be used or let go by the state depending on circumstances, as convenient. In building a serious struggle against the state, then, banking solely on our rights and throwing our lot in with that concept is a form of insanity. We need something else.
Democracy and fascism are two sides of the same coin, and it flips based on the social, political, geographic and economic context.
Repression in the austerity era
And the context is changing. We’re now full on in the era of austerity. Everywhere in the world, states are cutting their social and public sector policies, as well as their spending on public health, education, and social welfare. In order to deal with the current global financial crisis, the welfare state, established after the Second World War, is now being drawn back, with increasing privatization of whatever remains. By cutting social measures the State is also preparing to face the revolts of an increasing number of those exploited or excluded completely from the system, many of whose labor power has become redundant and who teeter around the service economy, trying to ink out a living. Austerity is the engine that is influencing the changing face and form that repression takes. Meanwhile, a real rage is simmering under this surface, and there are always those who chose to fight for freedom and for the destruction of this prison world that envelops us.
As anarchists, not only are we not surprised by these developments, but we refuse to hide behind the veil of justice to claim our innocence. What role does innocence play in a struggle anyway? For us, the courts are not the terrain of struggle on which we can win this war, even though we may have victories here and there. We refuse to use the discourse of the courts. In a world based on exploitation and misery, our desires for total freedom will always be criminal. The law’s main function is the maintenance of this system. Our struggle is against capital and the state in its entirety, and against all manifestations of this in our daily life, against the police and other forms and institutions that serve and reinforce the state’s power and control. As our struggles grow, develop, and intensify, it is not surprising that they will try to respond with greater repression.
How can we respond?
The question is, then, how do we respond? How many people hate this system? How many hide their rage, feeling isolated and alone? A world that needs prisons isn’t ours. Each pig is a symbol of rational domination over the body. Because we imagine a million other possible ways to live, and we have dreams, we refuse to bow our heads in front of the social order and its laws. Our power lies in the fact that we are not the only ones who are suffocating in this and who choose to fight it. The state’s control over our lives grows proportionally to the increase in people’s general sense of alienation. In the city, urban planning leads to a mapping of every inch of space, where there are less and less places to hide. Capital wages war on us by appropriating every centimeter of our space, every muscle of our bodies and the ideas in our heads. If we refuse to be colonized by this, we must find ways to fight it. We’ve made the choice to be in active conflict, together, in the face of this system rather than waiting in front of the television hoping that this system will collapse on its own. If the rioters of London, or those of the ghettos of Paris, or Egypt, or Greece, chose to take their lives into their own hands, we are surely capable of doing the same.
Now is the time to find each other as comrades in struggle, to self-organize. We need to create the things we want to see ourselves, because nobody will do it for us. We need to develop our practices in terms of communication, creativity, and conflictuality. The gap between ideas and action is really not that wide at all.
Now is also a time to work out our differences, and build a critical solidarity with each other, not letting the state tear us apart over petty conflicts. This doesn’t mean that we should erase our differences, or that we all have to work together, but we can still support each other.
Finally, we should be careful not to get cornered, or to get stuck in a war of attrition against the police. If we remain few, we will eventually lose. The repressive strategy of the Canadian state, similar to France, US, England and other dominant countries, is based on the theory of permanent counterinsurgency. This means that they must try to repress each social struggle in its infancy, before it has had a chance to grow or reach a certain critical mass.
Our greatest strength, then, is not our passion, nor our rage, nor even the sharpness of our revenge, but rather the possibility that our ideas and practices will spread to the powder keg that is this fragmented society.
