BroadSnark

Picture an anarchist in your head.  What do you see?

For most people the image is of a black clad, pubescent boy throwing rocks through a store window or spray painting an anarchist symbol.  People with a better sense of history might picture a slightly older, wild-bearded man making assassination plans.

And it is true that those images have some reality behind them.

There have been anarchists who have participated in violence.  Anarchists fought in the Spanish civil war.  Anarchists have claimed responsibility for political assassinations and other “propaganda of the deed.”  And there are certainly anarchists who have participated in symbolic acts of property destruction.

But does that make anarchists especially violent?

How many philosophies have not been used as an excuse for violence?  We fight wars in the name of democracy.  Assassinations are committed in the name of democracy.  Entire cities have been leveled in the name of democracy.  And yet few supporters of democracy believe their philosophy is particularly violent.

It makes little sense that a few violent acts and some (arguably) violent property destruction warrant anarchists getting such a bad rap.

Then, of course, there are the many anarchists who are/were also pacifists.  Some, like Tolstoy, derived their pacifist anarchism from Christianity.  Gandhi, who was inspired by Tolstoy, meshed his philosophical anarchism with Hinduism.  Anarchists from Howard Zinn to Alex Comfort were pacifists.  Even Emma Goldman, who once supported “propaganda of the deed,” changed her mind after seeing the effects of violence.

Clearly, we have a case of selective, collective memory.  How did that happen? Why are people only associating anarchists with violence?

Perhaps it has something to do with the way media selectively covers anarchism.  The coverage of Howard Zinn’s death is instructive.  An Associated Press story picked up by the New York Times and Washington Post says that Howard Zinn wrote about anarchist Emma Goldman, but doesn’t describe Howard Zinn as an anarchist.  Bob Herbert’s New York Times op-ed doesn’t mention “anarchist” once.  In article after article he is referred to as “left” or “radical,” but not as an anarchist.

Lest you get the idea that the media are loathe to use the word anarchist or anarchy, just try to search news coverage with those words.  The New York Times is happy to associate anarchists with al-Qaida or with Lenin.  Even if no anarchist claims responsibility for a bombing, they are almost certain to get credit for it.   And that doesn’t even begin to cover the times that newspapers try to scare the crap out of their readers by labeling catastrophes as scary anarchy.

Newspapers like the Times and Post are staunch defenders of the establishment.  And the establishment has every reason to try and make anarchists look bad.  As Howard Zinn said,

No doubt that anarchist ideas are frightening to those in power. People in power can tolerate liberal ideas. They can tolerate ideas that call for reforms, but they cannot tolerate the idea that there will be no state, no central authority. So it is very important for them to ridicule the idea of anarchism to create this impression of anarchism as violent and chaotic. It is useful for them, yes.

That doesn’t mean that every lowly reporter is consciously trying to to vilify us.  As a former media person told me, “they have a script” and they are playing it out.  They are writing the narrative that they have been brought up to write, the narrative that will get them promoted, even if that means conjuring up imaginary conflicts while ignoring real ones.

So the question is, what can we do to make it more difficult for the media to vilify us?

With all the stigma attached to the world anarchism, why call yourself an anarchist?

Anarchists are bound to ask themselves that question at some point.  Perhaps you run across another news report where anarchists are blamed for some random violence.  Maybe some pundit compares anarchists to terrorists.  Maybe it’s the constant use of the word anarchy as a synonym for violent chaos.  Or maybe you’re just tired of explaining it to people.  I understand.

But you do lose something when you lose the word anarchism.

For decades, brilliant minds have been writing about anarchism and what it means.  When someone wants to understand anarchism, I can point to stacks of writing.  If I refuse to call myself an anarchist, where do I point to?  Are we going to rewrite all that theory under a new name?  What a waste.

And what about the history of anarchism.  The most difficult thing to convince people is that anarchism can actually work.  Specific, successful anarchist examples exist.  And being able to point people to those is one of the best tools we have.  Yes, there have also been many failures.  But those may be even more important.  If we don’t study and learn from the mistakes of the past, we will repeat them.

Why let other people define the word for us?  The root of the word anarchy simply means “without leaders.”  Some people cannot imagine a world without leaders being anything but violent and chaotic.  Some people benefit too much from hierarchy to embrace a theory that takes that power from them.  Why should we allow those people to define the terms?

Would it really matter what we called our beliefs?  Does anyone think that if we believed the same things but called them a different name that people will be less suspicious of our ideas?  Liberals in the U.S. recently re-branded themselves.  Now they are called “progressives.”  And now conservatives vilify “progressive” just the same way they used to vilify liberal.

Most importantly, we need you.  If you are an anarchist who hesitates to embrace the term, then it is probably because you don’t want to be associated with chaos, violence, instability, or terrorism.  That makes you the ideal ambassador for anarchism.  If only those people who want to be associated with violence call themselves anarchists, then the cycle perpetuates and people who could learn from anarchist thought won’t go there.

You might be surprised how incredibly easy negative stereotypes can be to overcome.  When who you are doesn’t match up with the propaganda, people who meet you will start to question the propaganda.  The more anarchists a person comes in contact with, the less that person will be able to hold on to the negative stereotypes.

The agro cop that pulled out his gun at the snowball fight might actually be in a tiny bit of trouble here.

Yesterday, when I wrote about this, there were only a few articles around.  Now there are so many that I can’t even begin to give you all the links.  It’s being covered everywhere from the Huffington Post to the BBC to the Sydney Morning Herald to the South African News Blog.

That guy is known worldwide for being afraid of snowballs.  I almost feel sorry for him.  (O.k., not really.)

Washington City Paper reports that Detective Mike Baylor (that would be agro-cop’s name) is now on desk duty.  The Associated Press reports that Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier called his actions “totally inappropriate.” (Duh!)  And the Washington Post has a pretty good overview in today’s paper.  I’m not going to hold my breath that anything major will happen, but the fact that this went worldwide made it impossible for them to ignore it.

That horrible article from the local news that I linked to yesterday is still up.  Some German based news site has made it even more sensationalistic with their headline, Wild D.C. Snowball Fight Was Fun Until The Anarchist Show Up. DCist reports that CNN picked up the phony protest story. And the Scottrossblog has coverage of Faux News picking up the protester angle also.  It looks like Faux subsequently dropped that part of the story and the rest of the coverage I have seen left it out.  Good thing there were so many cameras around.

Some of the comments on the articles and blogs were hilarious.

“Stupid environmentalist wacko liberals… bringing snowballs to a gun fight.” LevonTostig at USA Today

“Isn’t a Hummer built to withstand the impact of a snowball?” MillardFil at TPM

There were a lot of other, more annoying and more troubling, comments on different blogs and articles.  But I don’t have time to be thoughtful about them right now, so I’m going to leave them for another day.

I’m having a really hard time deciding who are worse – police or media.

As you may have already heard.  There was a giant snowball fight at the corner of U and 14th in Washington, DC.  I was there from about 2:30 to 3:00 and it was fun as hell.  Maybe 100 or 150 people were gathered, split between the east and west sides of 14th.  Whenever the lights would change, everyone would yell “Charge!!” and start pelting the other side with snow.

Not long after I got there, some hilarious anarchists showed up with a sign that said “No War but Snowball War.”  Everyone loved it.  They joined the snowball war on the west side.  Occasionally, the west side would chant “Whose Snow?  Our Snow!”  Here are some pics I took.

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Scary right?

Well, apparently some DC cop thought it was scary because, after I left, he pulled a gun at the snowball fight.  You can read about it on Gawker and in the City Paper.  There is also a good account of what happened over at DCist.

The only thing I will dispute about the DCist account is that I saw lots of snowballs tossed at cars as they rolled through the intersection.  I’m sure some cars found it annoying, but it wasn’t dangerous.  It was a blizzard.  I was walking faster than cars were driving.  What was dangerous was driving on roads not cleared of snow.  Without a snowplow, you really had no damned business being in a car yesterday. (I included some street pics in the images above to give you an idea of how desolate the streets were.)

As incredulous as I am about that cop pulling a gun, the thing that is pissing me off even more is how Channel 7 news decided to cover the story.

A lively snowball fight on D.C. streets took a dark turn Saturday when anti-war protesters dressed in anarchist garb showed up, and a D.C. police officer pulled his weapon out of his holster.

Channel 7 also claims that the anarchists started pelting cars.  That is a lie.  That started before they got there.  And I saw many snowballs coming from the east side of the street (the opposite side from where they were).  More importantly, who cares!  They were f’ing snowballs!

So a vile, power drunk cop uses his gun to stop a snowball fight and the papers blame some good natured anarchists with a sense of humor.  This is so typical.  This is why people aren’t out in the streets about all the BS that happens every day.  News media isn’t in the business of watching police and government any more.  They just serve as their lying, sensationalist, propaganda arm.

Some of the comments I have seen on the reports are just killing me.  I think my favorite was the person who said the cop was protecting his property.  WTF!  From snowballs?!  And why the hell is a cop driving a hummer?

Ugh!

Conservatives like to talk about personal responsibility.  By that they mean taking responsibility for your own well being and perhaps that of your family and community.  But if you are not within the circle, what that comes down to is “fend for yourself.”

Liberals talk about taking responsibility for the less fortunate.  By that they mean donating time or money to organizations (that employ other liberals) and letting them help people in need.  But that creates dependency and doesn’t question the privilege underlying their altruism.

Anarchism, as a system based on cooperation, addresses the weaknesses in both liberal and conservative philosophies.

Like conservatives, anarchists think we should be taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our communities.  But where conservatives want to put up a wall, beyond which their responsibilities don’t go, anarchists have always understood that resolving our problems requires taking responsibility on a worldwide scale.

Like liberals, anarchists are concerned with the vast majority of people who struggle to have even the basic necessities of life.  But anarchists don’t want to install themselves in positions of power where they can met out drips and drabs of whatever liberals have been willing to give up.  Anarchists want to work side by side with people, questioning the hierarchies and privileges that cause those inequities.  We are not creating dependency, we are recognizing interdependency.

And anarchist principles work.

Worker managed coopertives are more productive than hierarchical models.  Community policing is more effective than conservative models.  Community involvement in schools means better results for kids.  Community involvement in budgeting means better allocation of resources.  The more people around when a conflict begins, the less likely that conflict will escalate.

These examples aren’t perfect representations of anarchism by any stretch of the imagination, but they do exhibit anarchist principles of responsibility and cooperation.  They demonstrate that we can solve our own problems.

Its easy to sit here and criticize our “leaders”.  But what did we expect?  Did people think we could just pull a lever every few years and then go back to watching American Idol?  If we want problems to be solved, we need to take responsibility for solving them.  And anarchism is a philosophy built around taking responsibility.

An anarchist future depends on more people adopting anarchist principles. It occurs to me that learning how individuals became anarchists may be useful.  So here is my story.

I’ve always been a little independent and rebellious, but my teenage years really brought that out. Partially it was my natural reaction to the suffocating socialization we are all subjected to. Partially it was me being pissed that the world turned out to be a lot shittier than I had been led to believe. I started learning real history at this point, particularly Native American history.

I got into a lot of trouble. I ran away frequently. Eventually, I was kicked out of school and out of my house. (Truth be told, I wanted to get kicked out of both. I really hated them.) Luckily for me I had been part of a work experience program in high school and, through them, had been working for a law firm.

I sort of skated into law firm work and was able to pay the bills without too much suffering. At twenty-five, I found myself managing the Florida operations of a litigation support service. I was busy and stressed and not particularly happy, but the money was good.

I started the office from the ground up. When a year had gone by, I called the home office to find out about their raise policy. I was told that, unless there was a promotion, nobody got more than .50 an hour raise. With a promotion, people could get a dollar.

Now the people who worked for me did not get paid what they deserved, not even close. Starting salaries for the organization were pathetic. And these people worked their asses off. They were there late and on weekends (sometimes with their kids). They didn’t get overtime.

After my boss told me what I could offer, I went silent on the phone. Sensing that I wasn’t happy about what she had just told me, she said “remember, if you pay your staff too much, you won’t get a big bonus at the end of the year.”

I got a percentage of the profits, you see, and that was supposed to motivate me somehow. But I knew that I never wanted to be that person, the person who gave other people less than they deserved so that they could get more. And I realized that all businesses operated on that same ‘me first’ principle. I left shortly thereafter to try my luck with nonprofits.

So off I went to California to get my bachelor degree and a nonprofit job. (Nonprofits require a B.A. to sweep the floor.) By that time I had my high school diploma and an A.A. in sociology – night school mostly. It didn’t take long for me to end up in a management position again. I didn’t plan for it or want it. I was trying to juggle college and a full time job, after all. I just had this stupid habit of feeling compelled to get done whatever needed to get done.

But, in the end, the nonprofit work wasn’t much better than the for profit work. We were helping people, but not as many as we should have been. We were government funded. When I calculated the percentage of tax dollars that actually went to direct services, it made me want to cry. Some of the grants went through so many agencies that, by the time each agency shaved their overhead costs off the top, there was virtually nothing left.

And even though the organization I worked for made a good pretense of listening to and caring about staff, much of it was for show. Additional funding we received went straight into raises for my boss and a fat consulting fee for a wealthy board member. Meanwhile, we were short-staffed and asking employees to start paying a portion of their rising health care costs.

Worse than the frustration, overwork, and disillusionment was how being a manager changed my relationship with all the people I worked with. Although I felt like I spent most of my day battling with my boss on behalf of the staff, in the end I was just one of the managers who was making decisions behind their backs – decisions they often did not like, decisions that were sometimes bad. It didn’t matter if I had fought the decision in those meetings. Once it was made I had to stand behind it.

I’ve worked for other nonprofits since that one. And while I have steadfastly avoided any more management positions, I have seen the same dynamic in every place I have worked. Larger nonprofits, especially here in DC, have the added issues of ivy league elitism and grotesque hierarchy (which they are in denial of). Yet somehow they think that they are going to make the world a more democratic, egalitarian, and just place from within an organization that is anything but.

It ain’t gonna happen.

Now I don’t mean to bag on the people that I have worked with. In fact, if the woman who told me that I wouldn’t get a big bonus if I gave my staff too much had been an asshole, my life might have taken a different course. The fact is that most of the people I have worked with aren’t any more evil or selfish than any other people. It was putting power into the hands of a few and pretending that they could actually represent the needs, desires and thoughts of everyone else that made everything go bad.

In short, experiencing the disasters of hierarchy led me to ask if it were possible to live without it. Once I started looking around, I realized that it is possible. In fact, I think it is impossible to live with it.

So that’s pretty much it. Take a fiercely independent person, let them experience the disasters of hierarchy from both perspectives, throw in a bit of anarchist leaning literature and…voila.

Any other anarchists out there want to share their journey or epiphany or slog to anarchism?

Once people find out I’m an anarchist (and get over the shock that I am not a fifteen year old punk rock white boy who likes to smash windows), they want to know what anarchy is (if not violence and mayhem).  I explain to them that anarchy means “without rulers” and that I am against all forms of domination.

Now, of course, they want to know how we are going to live without domination.  They tell me that, without police, we will have no protection from violent criminals.  They tell me that, without bosses, nobody would do anything and we’d all starve.  They tell me that, without coercion, people would just argue forever and nothing would ever get resolved.  They tell me that, if you remove coercive institutions tomorrow, someone would just go about trying to recreate them.

They think anarchy is a utopian dream.

They’re right.  It is a utopian dream.  And there is nothing wrong with utopian dreams.  Whenever humans have made progress, it has been because of people who had seemingly unrealistic dreams about human possibility.  Mother Jones, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King had utopian visions for the world.  Their visions may not have been fully realized, but they changed things radically for the better.

I don’t believe I will ever see a society that is completely free of coercion and violence.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m just going to roll over and accept coercion and violence.  I don’t believe I will ever see a society where hierarchies don’t exist.  But that doesn’t mean I’m just going to roll over and accept man over woman, white over black, straight over gay, rich over poor, owner over worker.

When they tell me that, without police, we will have no protection from violent criminals; I tell them that half the people who are languishing in prison are not violent criminals.  I tell them that “17.6 % of women in the United States have survived a completed or attempted rape.”  I tell them that most rapes go unreported and most rapists unpunished.  I tell them that, in many cases, the police are the rapists and not protecting us at all.  I tell them that I don’t think I’m protected now.

When they tell me that, without bosses, nobody would do anything and we’d all starve; I tell them that people are starving now.  I tell them that “almost one person in six does not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life.” And I tell them that there are alternatives to hierarchy.  I tell them about the FASINPAT in Argentina and Arizmendi bakeries in California.  I tell them about AK Press and Mondragon (soon coming to a U.S. town near you).

When they tell me that, without coercion, people would just argue forever and nothing would ever get resolved; I tell them that ordinary people, working together, can come up with solutions on their own.  And if they don’t believe me, they can ask nobel prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom.

I don’t disagree that there will always be people trying to rebuild the coercive institutions that we manage to tear down.  There are people out there who long for the antebellum south.  There are people who would like to bring back ruling monarchies.  And obscene amounts of people supported McCarthyism and the Patriot Act and every other rollback of civil rights some butthead has proposed.  That’s not an argument against anarchy.

I’m not naive.  I understand the challenges.  I understand how imperfect we all are.  But I also see the possibilities.  I see anarchy happening in little (and not so little) ways all over the world.  And I know that the people are wrong who think obtaining power, and using that power over others, is the only way to accomplish anything.  It isn’t the only way.  It isn’t the right way.

I do not believe that the world will ever be all peace, love, and cotton candy.  I do believe that the more people adopt anarchist principles, the better off we will be.

I recently finished reading Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory by Uri Gordon.  It’s a great book and a must read for anyone interested in contemporary anarchist thought, action, and dilemmas.

Like many anarchists, Uri emphasizes direct action, “action without intermediaries, whereby an individual or a group uses their own power and resources to change reality in a desired direction.” Direct action can entail blocking a roadway or tearing down a wall. It can also be creating something new within the old system, like a worker-run cooperative.

Direct action is not civil disobedience. Uri explains,

It is important to distinguish between direct action and a related concept, ‘civil disobedience’. I take the latter to mean any conscious collective defiance of the law, either for moral reasons or in an attempt to mount pressure on the authorities to respond to one’s demands…Thus civil disobedience is essentially a confrontational form of political dialogue between insubordinate citizens and the state, which does not challenge the basic legitimacy of the latter (since the state is expected to act in response to the disobedients’ demands – changing an unjust law, for example).  Often civil disobedience is accompanied by rhetoric that calls on society to live up to its professed ideals, reinforcing rather than challenging the status quo on society’s basic relations and institutions

I see Uri’s point, but I believe the picture he paints is incomplete. Often, the primary dialogue is not between the insubordinate citizens and the state, but between the insubordinate citizens and other citizens (either of their own country or of other countries in the world).

Actions by Gandhi and Martin Luther King were specifically designed to demonstrate the violence and injustice of the state.  MLK chose Montgomery, Alabama because he knew that the particularly brutal authorities would take action that would shock people, people who were not necessarily allies to that point.  Civil disobedience is theater as well as dialogue.

Anarchists could learn from their example.  It is a fact that there will never be anarchism without widespread commitment to anarchist principles.  Anarchists need to be more aware of how their actions will be perceived from the outside.

Anarchists should anticipate how their actions will be presented to the public by authorities and media.  And anarchists should be ready to respond to that presentation – clearly and creatively.  Unless we learn to do that, people will not be receptive to what we are saying.