Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 12:39:27 -0500 (EST)
From: "Shawn P. Wilbur" <swilbur-AT-wcnet.org>
Subject: Property damage and "violence"


Be patient with me, brothers and sisters, 'cause i'm afraid i've got some
reservations about this "property damage is not violence" line. In the
context of the Seattle protests, it is obviously useful to draw the
distinction between a few civilians that broke a few windows and the mass
of "civil servants" that did their best to break some heads (all to "serve
and protect," of course.) It also makes lots of sense to remind folks who
might be distracted by the graffitti and broken glass that the cops
*initiated* violence - against non-violent protestors - when they had lots
of other obvious options - and when it wasn't even in their best
interests, from a variety of viewpoints, to do so. (I have to say a good
deal of our "victory" was handed to us by conflict-happy cops.) 

What i'm far from sure about is whether there is enough difference between
cracking a window and cracking a head to make *violence* the
distinguishing characteristic. 

I'm far from sure...

OK? This is not a condemnation of anyone. I'm pretty damn pleased about
the outcome in Seattle. If i cried any for the Gap or Nike, they would be
pretty crocodilian tears. The vandalism damage to Seattle businesses was
pretty minor anyway - dwarfed by the lost business, for which the Seattle
powers-that-be can probably claim most direct responsibility. 

Still, i'm a little in the dark about what this "violence" is that takes
in some sorts of smashing and not others. So humor me for a minute... What
makes violence violent? Is it "extreme force" or "vehement feeling" (a
couple of dictionary possibilities)? If the first, does it matter what i
exert the force against? If the second, isn't the vehemence of my feeling
always towards a person - a cop or a capitalist, for instance - and my
expression of it, if it isn't just otherwise-pointless catharsis (a bit
like the drunks who occasionally break windows in my building), finally
still an expression of force against people, however indirect? (If i break
a window it's not because i hate windows. Maybe it's just because the
capitalist i want to break is protected by that cop, because the
pragmatics of revolt sometimes call for precisely indirect expressions of
violence?) 

I'm no pacifist, though i have some respect for what it takes to follow
that road seriously - and i must admit i think "activism" (as active-ism,
"shit, do SOMETHING!"-ism) is frequently as pathological as pacifism.
(There is not, as far as i can tell, any sort of corelation between the
number of calories burned in an activity and its political effectiveness,
though i have more than a few friends, comrades or students who seem to
work on that model. ;) And i'm certainly angry enough smash something. If
my own activism these days is mostly educational, that's because that's
where my community seems to need work. My experiences at the last KKK
rally here in town just confirmed my sense that the various narrow
ideological positions being taken (racist, anti-racist, law enforcement,
etc) were mutually supporting - and *all* in the way of real social
change. I would rather have had (the opportunity) to take the risks of
defending the community from the dangers of racist free speech - most
dangerous now that public space is almost gone and freely speaking is such
a lost art - than deal with the bizarre spectacle of out-of-town racists
facing mostly out-of-town anti-racists, under the watchful eye of hundreds
of out-of-town cops. 

That Klan rally experience is probably the source of some of my discomfort
with the particular take on violence being laid out here. In that case,
the cops were remarkably well-behaved - limiting themselves to looking
menacing, exploring a few activist orifices a bit more enthusiastically
than is probably quite proper, and generally doing what little things they
could to demean those who came to witness the spectacle of
speech-so-free-it-couldn't-happen-outside-fences-and-police-defences. The
Klan was in and out, saying nasty things, as is their habit. Somebody from
the protest crowd managed a little minor vandalism in a local coffee shop.
So maybe there was no "violence" at all that day - or maybe, and this is
the way the town saw it - the protestors won the cup by the smallest of
margins. Or, maybe, because the cops felt up a few folks while the
activists only fucked up a little furniture, the cops were the "most
violent." In any case, it certainly didn't *feel* like a day without
violence - or even with minimal violence. One of the cops told me he was
there "to make sure nothing changed" (for worse *or* better, it seems.)
The *threat* of violence was deployed on all sides, most successfully in
defense of the status quo. Is the threat of violence violent...?

One of the reasons i ask is that we have these ongoing debates with
capitalists, particularly "anarcho"-capitalists about "choice" and
"freedom" under capitalism. It's pretty common for the capitalists to
claim that "nobody is coerced" under capitalism - meaning, roughly (and
sometimes precisely), "nobody holds a gun on you and makes you go to
work." And it's pretty common for anarchists to patiently explain that
there is more than one kind of coercion, that one can be robbed of freedom
as effectively (or moreso) by systemic and/or indirect means. That seems,
in fact, to be a favorite method of limiting freedom, at least in the
"first world." Systemic control, with enough threat of simply repressive
force to remind us that it's finally our bodies that are in the balance. 

Isn't capitalism itself violent in all of its manifestations, not simply
in its more direct forms of repression and control? 

Anyway...

I'm just working around my sense that maybe we're being a little less than
honest with ourselves. Clean consciences maybe be counter-revolutionary at
this stage of the game. It's not like there's much space outside the
system of global capitalism from which we can critique with clean
hands. Maybe we should just own up to the fact that we probably can't both
change the world and do complete justice to everyone at the same time. We
might make fewer missteps along the road.

fwiw,

-shawn


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