If you've taken a history class or an anthropology course, you should know that first-hand accounts and documents are the most valuable to any story. What the Mercury News did was get testimony from the captain of the police force and utilized a video provided by ABC 7 with participant footage and next day thoughts from Santa Cruz students and business owners. The whole thing was sensationalized, pitting the "violent" protesters against the victimized businesses. Several things were misrepresented:
1. It was not a protest, like the Merc and ABC 7 say it was, but a street party, in a Reclaim The Streets fashion.
2. The "fire" on the patio was protesters putting their torches down, with no visible sign of burning seen by the workers the next day.
Well, my friend took the face-value information, from the Merc, and announced his feelings about anarchists based on his ill-informed opinions. Several things should be learned from this:
1. In reading an article in corporate media, dig deeper to find the source. My friend didn't do this, so he assumed the anarchists were endangering children and immigrants, when really the party was billed as a dance party at night with an ambiguous notion to either have a lot of fun partying or fucking shit up.
2. After finding the source, check out what other people have to say. From the following link, you can read other peoples' responses as well as follow other links to other accounts.
3. After you have a general idea of what happened, remember that the people in the story you read about don't represent everyone who share a similar identity, or title. My friend stated that he's fed up with anarchists since they do this shit all the time. That is a blanket statement, where one specific group of people are used, usually very stereotypically, to define a whole variety of groups. For instance, all white people are greedy. You know this is not true as long as you know me, and of course there are others. I could have just as easily said that socialists are elitist, but I know that that is not always the case. In this specific instance, these anarchists that performed destructive acts (note how I do not say "violent") against property are insurrectionary anarchists, and really don't help in the anarchist cause unless there does come a day when the government decides to make the USA a police state, which some feel it is already. Although I recognize we are living in a semi-police state, I also recognize the need for structure and coordination among anarchist groups in order to build an international solidarity base.
4. Finally, once you've identified the specific group who are the actors in the story, it relies on you to fill in the missing links in the story based on informed opinion. So basically, this step is to emphasize asking "Why?" On this note, we need to look a lot deeper into the reasons behind specific actions and tactics.
In this instance of insurrectionary anarchists, what drives them to destroy property, without distinguishing between local, family-owned businesses and the corporate chains?
Because I share similar feelings - albeit different tactics, mind you - and a similar world view, I believe I can answer this based on my own feelings. Private property, ever since its inception, has put people out of work and displaced people from a place in which to dwell. Before private property, people held the land and worked the land in common. Granted, the land belonged to royalty, but at least they had a place to live and food to eat. Now, people who own property use up all the resources on the land, they horde it all to themselves, or they sell it for profit. This makes property owners those with the most power and voice ("vote with your dollar" bullshit) in this society, as it is the working class that must sell their labor to these property owners in order for them to survive and pay for necessities. When one has this view, it would be easy to engage in destructive acts against property without distinguishing between corporate and family-owned.
Also, why would the insurrectionists choose to veil themselves in a street party and engage in property destruction then?
As I mentioned earlier, some people already believe we are in an all-out police state. With that said, most insurrectionary anarchists will veil themselves with bandanas and dress all in black so identifying features do not stand out to cameras and can't be reported to police. Because we live in an age of mass misinformation, these anarchists feel it is also necessary to veil themselves from the general public because the general public, in their eyes, are most often sheep to the slaughter, and therefore corroborators to the police. When engaged in acts of liberation, against property and non-consensual authority, many anarchists adopt this masked and blacked out costume. In terms of doing it during a street party, their aims may have been to disguise their destruction of property as a celebration of free space, or they really felt inclined to just take the party a step further. The street party was already breaking the laws of obstructing property and being an unpermitted march, so breaking windows of the institutions that keep people powerless wouldn't be much of a leap. What's true of any act of liberation, is that it snow balls. When one person demonstrates that they can cast off the shackles of society, or unjust laws that favor the property owners and not the dispossessed, then what generally happens is that others follow suit. When done as a solitary act, as in an assassination or arson attempt, it doesn't have much power and usually becomes discredited as an act of terrorism. But when people do it in crowds, it has the possibility of invoking revolt, insurrection, and even revolution. The problem with the black bloc, as the blacked out and masked anarchists are called, is that their costumes often alienate the rest of the crowd, who aren't likely to follow suit when the individuals they see performing the action isn't someone with whom they can identify.
As you can see, the situation is more complex than one makes it out to be. Thoughts?
I am curious about how you think this specifically relates to the concepts of group think or risky shift. I can see various links here but am wondering about the links that you see. I appreciate that you want to write about what you are passionate about and I think that it is incredibly important that you do. I only ask that you relate it to the concepts discussed in class. You do not have to follow the prompts exactly, but the whole purpose of this blog is to get students to apply these specfic concepts to the real world.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of anarchist protesters (and I think that even a street party aimed at the purpose of reclaiming or celebrating public space can be considered a protest in a privatized society like ours) how does the presence of others increase the likelihood of vandalism?
Within the anarchist movement, are there varying views pertaining to vandalism? I remember when the war with Iraq (part 2) started, I was part of a group of people protesting the war for several weeks in San Francisco. The group that I was protesting with were primarily people of color who particularly had issues with the anarchist (black block) contingent of the protest. The problem centered around the fact that the overwhelming majority of anarchists protesting were whites who would engage in vandalism, trashing buildings, setting things on fire, etc. and they would do so without regard to the fact that some of their actions gave the police license to be violent with the crowd. And of course, when the police target crowds, who is more likely to face brutality? criminal charges? arrests? etc. We tried to steer clear of the black block because their actions endangered the folks that we were with. Many of whom grew up in poor communities and had criminal records that were connected to their life circumstances. On the flip side, some of the white anarchists were youth from relatively privileged backgrounds that could have escaped an encounter with the law with little or no consequence.
These are some of the ways that group membership complicates interaction between people even when we are on the same political "side." Without recognizing these important connections, we risk harming one another.
I agree, and most insurrectionary anarchists and primitivist anarchists are white and have the privilege of escaping/separating themselves from the system. A lot of their actions are driven by a guilt for being part of this system and acted upon by privilege. I don't remember if it was here or another person's blog, but I did mention at some point that all the insurrectionary anarchists in the Santa Cruz march were male, and probably were acting off of a sense of entitlement that is backed by patriarchy. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't take the time to think their actions through. However, unlike corporate media and a lot of elitist activist, I will not just dismiss and defame these actions that are expressions of a very philosophical and deep urge to rebel. Instead, as I was trying to encourage in this blog posting, I try to encourage sociological mindfulness in looking at the tactics and messages of a behavior.
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