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Title: Why Break Windows?
Author: CrimethInc., Anonymous
Date: December 10th, 2014
Language: en
Topics: CrimethInc., propaganda of the deed, property, violence
Source: Retrieved on December 15th, 2014 from http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2014/12/10/why-break-windows/

CrimethInc., Anonymous

Why Break Windows?

From the initial revolt in Ferguson last August to the demonstrations in

Oakland and Berkeley last week, property destruction has been central to

a new wave of struggle against police violence. But what does

vandalizing businesses have to do with protesting police brutality? Why

break windows?

First, as countless others have argued, because property destruction is

an effective tactic. From the Boston Tea Party to the demonstrations

against the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, property

destruction has been an essential part of many struggles. It can

pressure or punish opponents by inflicting an economic cost. It can

mobilize potential comrades by demonstrating that the ruling forces are

not invincible. It can force issues that otherwise would be

suppressed—we would certainly not be having a nationwide conversation

about race, class, and policing were it not for the courageous actions

of a few vandals in Ferguson. Finally, it conveys an uncompromising

rejection of the prevailing order, opening space in which people may

begin to imagine another.

Property destruction charges don’t look good on a résumé or in a

campaign for city council, but perhaps this is a good thing. It means

that political vandalism is usually a selfless act—and even when it

isn’t, it has to be its own reward. There is more reason to suspect paid

nonprofit activists and aspiring politicians of ulterior motives than to

question the motivations of vandals. This may explain why activists and

politicians cast such aspersions on them.

Shop windows represent segregation. They are invisible barriers. Like so

much in this society, they simultaneously offer a view of “the good

life” and block access to it. In a polarizing economy, shop windows

taunt the poor with commodities they cannot afford, status and security

they will never attain. For millions upon millions, the healthy food,

medicines, and other goods they need are the breadth of an entire social

class away from them, a gulf they will not cross in a lifetime of hard

work—a gulf represented by half an inch of plate glass.

To smash a shop window is to contest all the boundaries that cut through

this society: black and white, rich and poor, included and excluded.

Most of us have become inured to all this segregation, taking such

inequalities for granted as a fact of life. Breaking windows is a way to

break this silence, to challenge the absurd notion that the social

construct of property rights is more important than the needs of the

people around us.

One reactionary argument goes that vandals are wrecking “their own

neighborhoods,” but this is a disingenuous way to speak about those

whose names do not appear on any deeds. Indeed, when developers speak of

“improving” these neighborhoods, they mean the de facto expulsion of the

current population. The problem in Ferguson and everywhere like it is

not that the economy has been interrupted; the problem is the routine

functioning of the economy itself. In a profit-driven society, the more

that poor people work and pay rent, the poorer they will end up relative

to those who are profiting on their labor—that’s where profit comes

from. It is dishonest to blame the victim here, as if more

submissiveness could produce a different result. In a pyramid scheme,

somebody has to form the bottom tier, and ever since the colonization of

the so-called Americas that has always meant black and brown people.

As others have pointed out, colonization, gentrification, mass

incarceration, and police killings are all forms of displacement, of

erasure. We have become accustomed to ceaseless, dramatic disruptions of

the environments we live in—so long as it is capitalists and police

driving them, not poor people. This normalizes an alienated relation to

the urban landscape, so whole neighborhoods can be leveled and replaced

without anyone batting an eyelid. It normalizes a social system that

itself has only been imposed on the earth over the past couple

centuries, making the most unsustainable way of life ever practiced seem

timeless and eternal. Vandalism demonstrates that both the current

disposition of urban space and the social system that determines it are

contingent and temporary—that it is possible, even with limited

resources, to transform space according to a different logic.

Gentrification and vandalism are both forms of intervention in the urban

landscape—the difference is that gentrification is top-down, while

vandalism is bottom-up.

It is not a coincidence that shop windows have been targeted in protests

against police violence. Businesses, be they multinational or local, are

the tax base that pays for police, and without police they would not be

able to accumulate so much wealth at everyone else’s expense. In this

situation, addressing protests directly to the police is oblique, for

the police answer to business owners and politicians, not to public

opinion. It is much more direct to target their bosses, the capitalists

themselves. Cost them enough money in smashed windows, and maybe they’ll

think twice about what kind of policing they call for.

“But some poor worker is going to have to clean that up,” sanctimonious

liberals charge whenever they see a protester making free with the

avenues of the wealthy. Anyone who has worked a blue-collar job knows

that this is pure bunk. Replacing windows or scrubbing graffiti off a

façade is no worse than any other kind of work one can get in that pay

bracket—it’s not as though the workers in question would be doing

something pleasant and fulfilling otherwise. If anything, vandalism

creates jobs, offering additional work opportunities to service industry

employees and construction workers whose labor would not otherwise be

required. This means you can’t smash capitalism one storefront at a

time—but trying to might at least redistribute a little wealth downward.

It is typically liberal for critics to present the poor as the victims

of confrontational tactics, when in fact it is their own status and

comfort they fear for.

In the more paranoid version of this perspective, liberals who assume

that everyone else must be as satisfied with the prevailing order as

they are declare that only the police themselves, in disguise of course,

would have smashed the windows they are tasked with protecting. Like

other conspiracy theories, this attributes all agency to a single

nefarious power, denying the existence and strategic sense of those who

take action against it.

All this is not to argue that window-smashing is itself enough to change

the world. In the final analysis, sabotage and arson are the strategy of

a retreating army—of those who know they will not hold a given terrain

for long. A movement strong enough to retain the territory it seizes

from the police wouldn’t need to break or burn anything, only to

transform it. On the other hand, as long as such inequalities persist,

people are bound to lash out against them via property destruction as

well as other tactics. Anyone who truly desires to see an end to

property destruction should hasten to bring about the end of property

itself. Then, at last, the only reason to break windows would be thrill

seeking.