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Title: Anarchy in the USA Author: David Graeber Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: Seattle Source: Sept. 30th 2022 from https://inthesetimes.com/issue/24/03/graeber2403.html
Anarchists often complain they only make the news when they break
something. This article is no exception.
It might come as a surprise to those reading the mainstream press, but
at least 2,000 anarchists actually participated in the Seattle protests,
by some counts as many as 5,000--and the overwhelming majority did not
smash anything. There were anarchists in the alternative media network,
creating Web sites and helping run the micropower radio station;
anarchist medical teams; anarchists distributing free food and providing
legal support for those arrested. Most of all, they were involved in
nonviolent direct action, occupying streets, building barricades and
blockading delegates. The vast majority were anarcho-syndicalists or
libertarian socialists of one sort or another. For instance, there were
some 200 marching under the Industrial Workers of the World banner in
the labor march; they were especially proud of having convinced many of
the AFL-CIO contingent to ignore their marshals' planned route, which
veered off from the hotel where the confrontation was actually taking
place.
There also were anywhere between 50 to 100 of what other anarchists
called the "black bloc," who came with masks and crowbars, intending to
make direct attacks against the property of multinationals. Newspaper
reports notwithstanding, they were not in fact a band of primitivists
from Eugene, Oregon, followers of a local guru named John Zerzan.
Actually, the group was extremely heterogeneous, including some
Zerzanites as well as individualists, eco-anarchists and radicals of any
number of other stripes--some not even anarchists--who had decided a
strict policy of nonviolence was inappropriate. If they had anything in
common, it was that they tended to be young and most had some
involvement with local ecological movements, increasingly radicalized in
recent years as police have responded to nonviolent, anti-logging
lockdowns with pepper spray and escalating levels of brutality.
A word of background. Anarchism is not, in fact, the advocacy of
violence and disorder. It is a social movement with deep roots in
American history, founded above all on an opposition to all structures
of systematic coercion and a vision of a society based on principles of
voluntary association, mutual aid and autonomous, self-governing
communities. "An-archy" is not a reference to chaos; it's Greek for
"without rulers." The famous A-in-an-O symbol, familiar from T-shirts
and brick walls, actually refers to a phrase from French philosopher
Henri Proudhon, "Anarchy is Order; Government is Civil War"--i.e., the
only genuine order is that not imposed by men with guns. As history
repeatedly has shown, nothing is so guaranteed to provoke a violent
response on the part of the "forces of order" than someone telling them
they don't have the right to act violently. From as early as the 1870s,
anarchists were demonized as bomb-throwing fanatics and assassins who
should expect no mercy; this, of course, had the unfortunate effect of
ensuring that most anyone who hit out randomly against The Man, whether
by trashing their high school or unabombing, would also claim to be an
"anarchist."
What we see in Seattle then is the revival of a very old pattern: "We
respect the protesters," declare the authorities, "except for a handful
of anarchists"--and then order police to open up on all of them with
tear gas, pepper spray, concussion grenades, truncheons and rubber
bullets.
Many anarchists were ambivalent about the black bloc's actions, but all
were careful to add that this was anything but random violence. Their
targets--Nike, Starbucks, The Gap and the (suggestively named) Planet
Hollywood--were carefully selected. Extreme care was taken not to do
anything that might hurt someone; the only fires set were far from
buildings; windows were smashed only when no one would be in the way of
broken glass. All this was in dramatic contrast with the police, whose
use of force was almost exclusively aimed at hurting people.
Finally, it's hard to deny that the black bloc in Seattle got a point
across. All along, they were arguing that organizations like the WTO are
yet another addition to a growing apparatus of global rule, in which the
powers of the state hardly even pretend to respond to the needs of local
communities, and are simply put at the service of multinational
corporations. How could mere words bring this home so vividly as the
spectacle of the mayor of Seattle declaring martial law in order to
protect Starbucks?