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Title: Keepers of the Flame
Author: Esther Kaplan
Date: January 29, 2002
Language: en
Topics: Warcry, New York City, anarchist movement, United States of America
Source: Retrieved on July 18, 2004 from https://web.archive.org/web/20040718074226/https://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0205/kaplan.php
Notes: Published in The Village Voice.

Esther Kaplan

Keepers of the Flame

he arrived in the U.S. from India with her parents when she was just a

little kid—long before she took the name Warcry or started protesting

institutions like the World Economic Forum. It was 1976, the

bicentennial, and right off her dad bought her a small American flag.

She says he saw America as a land of promise, but she watched him work

hard as a researcher every day of his life only to die young. “I don’t

want to live my whole life for the system,” she says. At college in the

Bay Area, she read Emma Goldman for the first time, and “it was like

someone threw open a window in my brain. Fresh air rushed in and I never

went back.” She got her direct action chops tree-sitting in old growth

forests—and then came Seattle, and the chance to take on the “corporate

death machine” itself.

In an activist video about that now famous protest against the World

Trade Organization, there’s a shot of Warcry, a black scarf masking all

but her radiant eyes, shouting giddily, “I always wanted to be part of a

revolution!” Yet this same Warcry has kept that little flag all these

years, and still feels an affinity for her dad’s struggles and hopes.

“The American dream is dead,” she says. “But there are certain American

ideals—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to dissent—these

are things I believe in and would like to make real.”

That zeal, matched by the passions of thousands of like-minded young

radicals, will be on full display in New York City this week, as

activists raucously confront the World Economic Forum, whose thousands

of global elites will gather at the Waldorf-Astoria. This outpouring

will get a boost from the recent resurgence of anarchism after years

relegated to the oral history dustbin.

The cries of the anarchists may echo loudly in this post-9-11 world. In

a climate where dissent has been called un-American, and the Patriot Act

has granted the government new powers to eavesdrop, arrest, and detain,

many of the global justice movement’s more mainstream players have

decided to lie low. The Sierra Club has completely bowed out, while at

the fair trade outfit Global Exchange, says cofounder Kevin Danaher, “we

are still dusting ourselves off” from the blow of 9–11. The group will

conduct only teach-ins. The AFL-CIO had hoped to march, but was denied a

permit.

So the anarchists and direct action types like Warcry have been left to

lead the charge. Not only have they assembled the samba bands, but also,

for the first time, the anti-capitalists even negotiated a permit for a

march, the only legal one this week. To a great extent, what happens at

the WEF showdown—the size and energy and confrontational tone—depends on

them.

While the whole world wasn’t watching, anarchists have spent their time

between demos getting organized.

If you had wandered into the InterGalactic Anarchist Convention last

Sunday, in the Chashama Theater just off of the New Times Square, you’d

have passed a tableful of Barricada back issues, including the one

featuring “The Black Bloc in Genoa: An Affinity Group’s Account”; stacks

of literature on animal rights and labor exploitation in the global

south; free copies of To Arms!!!, with its ecumenical listing of WEF

protests and a handy lesson on wheat-pasting, published by the

CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective. You might also have been invited down

to the basement for a vegan meal fashioned from supermarket throwaways,

or happened upon a few dozen sweatshirted activists in low-slung pants

and rumpled hair talking protest.

Perhaps none of this would have surprised you. But most striking, if you

listened in, would have been the gently earnest tone of the debates, and

the palpable humility of the participants. That night, a twentysomething

hippie sitting cross-legged on the floor offered up a defense of

nonviolence that could have come out of SNCC’s civil rights playbook—“We

draw out the inherent violence of the police”—while a rosy-faced

teenager decried what he called “militant pacifism” and an older woman

drew a distinction between damaging property (OK, since property doesn’t

feel pain) and injuring people (unacceptable). Everyone spoke briefly

and passionately and stopped to really listen, and speakers reflected on

how much they had to learn. At a larger meeting, facilitators set aside

just five or 10 minutes for each agenda item—as if to schedule in a half

hour was too presumptuous—extending the time only after seeing enough

fluttering fingers (a sign of consensus). Sunday night’s impromptu

conversation ended only when Lena, 28, one of the conference organizers,

quietly mentioned that the evening panelists had arrived, and would it

be all right for them to take the microphone?

The textured disagreements that aired out that weekend—sandwiched

between lectures on Afghanistan, Argentina, and “Why WEF Is Evil”—hardly

call to mind the anarchism we have read about in the two years since

Seattle.

It was there that America discovered anarchism for the first time since

Sacco and Vanzetti—in the intimidating form of the masked militants of

the black bloc. “Street rage,” blared The New York Times; “nightmare of

protests,” declared NBC Nightly News, as everyone from the Rainforest

Action Network to the president rushed to separate the good protesters

from the bad. Rainforest head Randy Hayes said the vandalism hurt the

movement, while direct action trainer John Sellers, head of the Ruckus

Society, called it “inexcusable.” Last year’s protests in Genoa inspired

more variations on the theme: The black bloc’ers were “barbarians at a

castle’s gates ... whose modus operandi is to infiltrate more moderate

groups and launch attacks,” reported Newsweek. And as WEF delegates

began to arrive at ground zero, even a Village Voice reporter

regurgitated whole the police assertion that black bloc’ers are “Al

Qaeda-like.”

This groupthink has not only obscured the true nature of the protest

violence—since the police have been by far the most aggressive

perpetrators, from the pepper spray and nightsticks of Seattle to the

fatal bullets of Genoa—but also made invisible a significant new

development: The anarchist fringe is fast becoming the movement’s

center.

Decades of Republican assaults on the basic functions of government,

capped by a presidential election decided by dirty tricks and partisan

courts rather than by popular will, have plowed the soil for a

generational politics that is suspicious of political power. No Logo

author Naomi Klein has long argued that the global justice movement has

an inherently anarchist feel. But as the months have rolled by since

Seattle, more and more activists, with little fanfare, have come to

explicitly identify as anarchists, and anarchist-minded collectives are

on the rise.

There are now more than 175 Food Not Bombs chapters, at least 60

Independent Media Centers (the newest of which are mostly in the global

south), nearly a dozen People’s Law Collectives, countless troupes of

puppetistas, and several new medic teams, including one cofounded by

anti-capitalist EMS worker James Creedon, who assisted with the World

Trade Center rescue. And starting with the Quebec free-trade protests

last spring, the radical wing of the movement has consolidated its

troops under the banner of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence. All of these

formations will provide crucial infrastructure for the protests ahead.

The movement is widely perceived as anti-intellectual, but sales are up

at Oakland’s AK Press, which publishes more than 80 anarchist titles,

including a new English translation of Daniel Guérin’s classic anthology

of anarchism, No Gods No Masters; and students are flocking to Vermont’s

Institute for Social Ecology, where they study the anarchist works of

Murray Bookchin and, according to instructor Brooke Lehman, 29, “spend

the summer talking about how we might realize our vision of direct

democracy and freedom.”

Unlike modern-day social reformers, who want Nike to let inspectors into

their factories or the World Bank to forgive some debt, anarchists

explicitly oppose capitalism itself. They don’t attack the International

Monetary Fund or the WEF just because their policies exploit the poor,

but because their power is illegitimate. They envision an egalitarian

society without nation states, where wealth and power have been

redistributed, and they take great pains to model their institutions in

this vein, with autonomous, interconnected structures and

consensus-based decision making. UC Santa Cruz professor Barbara

Epstein, an expert on direct action, senses that anarchism has now

become “the pole that everyone revolves around,” much as Marxism was in

the ‘60s. In other words, even young activists who don’t identify as

anarchists have to position themselves in relation to its values.

The reformist perspective is likely to retreat further with groups like

the Sierra Club absent from WEF week and the AFL-CIO presence reduced

from a march to a rally. Danaher says Global Exchange will focus instead

on the alternative World Social Forum in Brazil. Shooting more from the

hip, Public Citizen staffer Mike Dolan, an architect of Seattle, says

his group has not yet endorsed the one permitted march because the

sponsor, Another World Is Possible, “can’t guarantee that the event will

be nonviolent, and that the movement won’t be marred by vandalism.” At

press time, Drop the Debt, Earth First!, Rainforest Action Network, and

the Ruckus Society had all not signed onto the march, either.

With these significant players sitting it out—or penned in by

overzealous police—who’s left to distribute schedules, run listservs,

host spokescouncils, paint banners, and coordinate legal and medical

support, food, and housing? The anarchists are making do.

The Anti-Capitalist set tends to be far more mixed by background than,

say, the middle-class student movement, and no deep pockets are keeping

them afloat now. Their genius is in making use of the wealth all around

them—whether human resources or capitalism’s leavings—despite a lack of

cash or access to traditional forms of power.

At a party last week for the political comic book World War III at

Theater for a New City, an interview with InterGalactic conference

organizer Lena turned into a group discussion—as so many interviews with

anarchists seem to, the collective impulse is so strong—about the joys

of mutual aid. “It’s about finding out who needs what and filling in the

blanks,” says Lena, who incidentally is the daughter of a construction

worker and has supported herself since age 16. Her friends Jenna, 22, a

slender Asian woman; and Kevin, 23, Jenna’s lanky white partner, are

indeed itinerant activists, floating from community to community in what

they see as a profoundly American hobo tradition. They live off

bartering and networks, not checks from Mom. “I appreciate anarchists so

much,” says Jenna, “because I’ve never gone to a demo and not found

housing or food.” Kevin recalls showing up in Houston, hearing about a

collective anarchist household, and bunking there for a month and a half

while he engaged in prisoner support. The two just returned from a trip

to a punk show in Gainesville, Florida, that morphed into a month of

work on a community farm.

The idea is that the resources to live, and the chance to do good, are

out there for the taking—it’s an economy of opportunity, not scarcity,

an ethos that extends to their analysis of global poverty. Ben, 21, an

NYU dropout who now cooks food each week for the homeless denizens of

Tompkins Square Park through Food Not Bombs, says anarchism’s

egalitarianism helps attract youth who are new to politics of any kind.

“Some of the drunkest kids I’ve ever seen are now going to Food Not

Bombs meetings and taking responsibility,” he says. “Once they find a

place where they’re not on the bottom rung, where they can take

initiative, they do it. They start out listening to a Subhuman song and

they end up reading Noam Chomsky.” Come to think of it, he later adds,

that’s pretty much how it happened for him, too—catching punk shows at

ABC No Rio, noticing the Food Not Bombs shopping cart, and slowly waking

up to the fact that poverty and hunger are not natural. As the

conversation breaks up around midnight, the kids head out to dumpster

dive, to supply food for their own kitchens and the anarchists camping

out at Cabo Rojo in the Bronx, to save that community garden from the

bulldozer.

After spending any significant amount of time around the

nonhierarchical, collective sensibilities of these anti-capitalists, you

can begin to feel your entire life is corrupted by absurd power

imbalances, your apartment overrun by excess goods. Ben mentions that

Food Not Bombs had a serious discussion about collecting more plastic

forks from fast food places so they could put savings from the cost of

purchasing them toward the WEF legal defense fund. David Graeber, 40, a

Yale professor and Anti-Capitalist Convergence cofounder, says the

network would probably spend no more than a couple thousand on the WEF

protests, all earned through passing the hat.

Which is not to say this movement is ascetic. Lena and her friends use

words like joy and beauty as often as some long-ago editor of Mother

Earth. Jenna rhapsodizes about how anarchists constantly create space

for poetry jams, musical performance, and art; Ben giggles as he

recounts a black bloc contingent at a Boston biotech protest, led by a

man in a bunny suit carrying a sign that read “The Violent Fringe.” This

week, as the NYPD practices cracking heads at Shea Stadium, the

puppetistas are madly rehearsing a street tango corps and a line of

Radical Rockettes, assembling a samba band, and building papier mâché

globes painted with images of better, possible worlds.

In debates over the sustainability of the global justice movement, the

anarchists are mostly chalked up as a problem. But their spirit of

cultural celebration, combined with an elaborate web of small,

accessible collective endeavors, has clearly provided activists with

skills, support structures, and points of entry.

Of course there’s still that nagging question of violence, as important

to the movement as to the media, because, as Danaher of Global Exchange

says, “The test of any tactic is whether it builds the movement. And you

don’t attract people to a movement that looks dangerous and messy.” But

there were plenty of half-a-million-strong peaceful marches in

Washington, D.C., over the past decade that raised nary an eyebrow,

while Seattle galvanized a generation.

Watching some old footage from that watershed event, Warcry shakes her

head at the depth of the people’s discontent. “To be honest, what the

left has done since the ‘60s hasn’t been that successful, and we can’t

afford to embrace tactics that don’t work,” she says. “I don’t think

Seattle would be on the map if it weren’t for the catalyzing level of

rage that was made visible through property destruction.” She calls

window-smashing “the transformation of the psychogeographic landscape”

and points out that it’s far more strategic than most people think—with

specific corporate targets, such as sweatshop operators like Nike—and

getting more strategic as the years progress. Besides that, as Public

Citizen’s Dolan emphasizes, whether people get injured in New York this

week is mostly up to the police.

When pushed, most of the Anti-Capitalist crew recognize that the people

of this city—including its uniformed officers—are still recovering from

the trauma of 9–11. Though it’s hard to find an anarchist who doesn’t

fiercely defend the right to destroy certain kinds of property, placing

vandalism of McDonald’s in the respected tradition of the Boston Tea

Party, most are also cautious that the movement itself not get too

attached to this, or any other, particular tactic. “No one’s talking

property destruction right now in New York City,” says Graeber, a

sometime black bloc’er, “though a certain level of urban redecoration is

appropriate. No one’s going to abjure spray paint.”

No one’s promising that there won’t be a black bloc, either. Warcry

recalls joining the bloc at previous protests, the sense of anonymity,

collectivity, of people you don’t even know having your back, of

“glimpsing the possibility of a world where they don’t have total and

absolute control,” of feeling that viscerally. Her tribe is the one

that’s not intimidated by the new Patriot Act, that hasn’t lost sight of

challenging corporate exploitation even while there’s a war on.

Warcry, as always, speaks from the heart. “We want to save the life of

this planet,” she says. “We can’t afford to sit this one out.”