We Told You So

September 6, 2008 at 11:22 am · Filed under From the Trenches, posted by


As of September 2 practically all of the predictions in our most recent feature, “What to Expect from the Conventions” have been borne out by reality. Despite millions of dollars of security, thousands of riot police and national guardsmen, and a dramatic series of preemptive raids and arrests, authorities were powerless to prevent massive direct action from disrupting St. Paul during yesterday’s Republican National Convention. The day began with hard blockades all around downtown and several different marches, including a black bloc that destroyed police cars and corporate property. A full nine hours of street conflicts ensued, involving a broad diversity of participants and tactics.

At both the DNC and RNC, anarchists showed themselves to have seized the initiative to determine the character of street demonstrations. The US anarchist movement has survived several years of repression and attempted co-optation, proving that the upsurge associated with the anti-globalization era was not a flash in the pan: if anything, we are stronger today than ten years ago.

Read our predictions and analysis here; absurd local media coverage here; corporate media coverage here; and legal updates here.

conventiongoer said,

September 7, 2008 @ 11:55 am

I think that this is a pretty dishonest assessment of what happened. You don’t mention that almost all of the blockades were swept up by police with very little effort in about an hour and that what direct action did occur without arrest was only because the police assessed it as a non-threat and let it happen to appear tolerant.

You don’t mention that the Xcel Center, arguably the actual target of all the blockading, wasn’t disrupted in the slightest, and that while protesters were being arrested in great numbers, delegates sat quietly within the gates or on their motor coaches while sipping iced drinks and chatting amiably about all of their political plans. Aside from a few glimpses, they were mostly unaware of the efforts in progress to make their lives difficult. When asked on camera about the protesters, they chuckled.

The photo you’ve chosen is one dramatic instant of a larger march that was, really, a non-event. And if you were to rotate the lense on that camera around, you’d see that there are at least as many reporters there snapping photos as there are actual people there involved in the confrontation. It could have easily doubled as the set of a movie, what we see here is everyone acting on the stage.

If anything, we are stronger today than ten years ago? I know that it’s important not to be too demoralized by the truly depressing reality of recent events, but this was not a show of strength. Nothing happened here, the blockades failed instantly, people were gassed and sprayed and harassed and intimidated and beaten down and left helpless, and the convention didn’t even notice. Maybe a few hundred anarchists even showed up to try? I mean, come on, the /weather/ affected the convention more strongly than all that the anarchists in the US could muster.

And for all that, a large portion of the few that even tried anything are in jail facing very serious legal charges. If this is what constitutes victory, then I think winning is going to kill us eventually.

ret marut said,

September 7, 2008 @ 3:57 pm

This comment is hardly a description of the reality hundreds of us, if not thousands, experienced in St. Paul.

Several of the blockades lasted for several hours, and there were disturbances and street conflicts all day. Not all the delegates were able to pose for the media shots intended to demoralize protesters–some of them complained in the papers about having been physically assaulted. It’s true that the convention itself was not shut down, but the central goal for most organizers and participants was achieved: anarchist organizing determined the character of the RNC protests, and escalated the conflict with the powers that be. Many didn’t expect that the convention would definitely be shut down (a goal that became more remote when the schedule was changed for the first day and it was decided that only 51% of the delegates needed to attend), but felt it was necessary from the outset to aim “beyond the goal” to achieve the desired results. This is why it was originally consensed that the slogan would be “Crash the Convention” rather than “Shut Down the Convention,” if you can remember those discussions from a year ago.

The larger march from which the above photo was taken also included extensive property destruction and street conflict on a level we haven’t seen in the United States for many years. After the repression and attempted co-optation of the past decade, it’s amazing what people achieved in St. Paul.

It’s a little facile that you argue that we should feel unimportant because the weather posed a greater threat to the RNC than anarchists did. Weather conditions, generally speaking, are a more powerful influence on human affairs than just about anything else could be.

I agree with you on two counts, though. Winning will kill us eventually. If we manage to pose a threat to hierarchical power, we will certainly be much more fiercely repressed than we were in St. Paul. That’s a basic part of struggle. On the other hand, not struggling is not necessarily safer.

Second, it’s important now to focus on supporting those facing legal challenges. You call them “the few,” but there are well over a hundred people with felony charges right now, which is a very serious situation. Let’s make a real effort to raise money and support for them.

But St. Paul was a victory, not a defeat. If we hadn’t posed a threat to them, the resultant crackdown would have looked more like the police strategy in Denver.

rechelon said,

September 7, 2008 @ 6:29 pm

I don’t think we should feel “unimportant”, but I agree that mythologizing this into a profound victory (rah, rah, go team!) is pretty fucking disingenuous and patronizing. Watching people repeat the mantra “spectacle crashed” to themselves as comfort after the confrontations was pretty disheartening because it’s a narrative that simply won’t last. Eventually common sense will kick in and they’ll feel a malaise and

The reality on the ground is that — in this battle — we mostly got our asses kicked.

Now that’s not to say that there weren’t upsides and charged, spectacle-breaking moments that will inspire participants for decades to come. But it does mean that on the whole we did not accomplish even a tenth of what we set out to do (even realizing, as I said a year ago, that Shutting Down the conventions was always beyond the realm of plausibility). And claiming this as a victory will only make us look self-deluded to those outside our mantra circles.

That said. The extent of the state’s brutality may mean that they won this battle by over-extending themselves on the whole, committing too many forces and revealing too much of the police state we live in. And that may mean this lost battle is a net positive gain in the broader war. But it’s still a lost battle.

And part of the failure was a matter of activists voting with their feet. The US anarchist movement had the capacity to shut down 10 St. Pauls. But we didn’t. Activists, those with the experience, capacity and active presence in our communities voted with their feet and not even a single fucking tripod went up.

That alone means something. Or it should. Ignoring that reality, much less LYING about it is a disservice to them and baldly selfish with regard to one’s own preferred tactics.

conventiongoer said,

September 7, 2008 @ 8:25 pm

Shit Ret Marut, don’t suggest that I’m “not supporting our troops” just because I disagree with the posted analysis of what happened. My friends are in jail too, but that doesn’t mean we can’t honestly look at our strategies. I only commented here because I was so struck by how grossly this account differed from my impressions and the impressions of everyone I’ve talked with since. I mean, I realize that anarchist actions reports are notoriously over-sold and unreliable, but Stalin’s memo “dizzy from success” is actually what came to mind when I read this. I’d rather be honest about what happened to my friends in jail than paint some rosy picture of martyrs who went down during the glorious victory in the streets of St. Paul.

For instance, I don’t think the march that the above photo is from was as hot as you’re characterizing it. In reality, there *weren’t enough anarchists there* to safely pull off a black bloc type action, so the small number that managed to get together just joined the only roving march that did have the numbers: funk the war. In the short burst where all of the property destruction happened, the bulk of the people there (who had organized the march and were now being used for crowd cover) were screaming, begging, pleading, and literally crying in an effort to get them to stop. It wasn’t some massive orgy of property destruction, and at times the tiny black bloc used physical violence and intimidation against other people in the march who vocally disapproved of their tactics. So maybe they did “determine the character” of the march, but I think it’s a pretty false victory.

The blockades that “lasted several hours” were the ones that the police left alone because they weren’t a threat. There’s great news coverage of activists locked down in the street, bored out of their minds, because nobody came to confront them. What I heard was that eventually they all just voluntarily unlocked themselves and went elsewhere, trying to find something happening somewhere. The disturbances and street conflicts that lasted for the rest of the day were protesters who started trying other things after all their blockades had fallen. They were left alone until they got into areas where they could be threatening, and then they were immediately arrested.

The fact is that almost nobody I was there with walked away from this feeling good, energized, excited, or… victorious. Ten years ago, these summits were sparks; they were simultaneously the symptoms of and the source of excitement in communities across the US. This was the opposite. Lots of people were trying really hard to make this into something that could validate us, our tactics, or our strength, but it just didn’t happen. If you think that these events demonstrated that we’re collectively stronger than ten years ago, then you were either somewhere much less exciting than me ten years ago or in some city other than St. Paul during the RNC.

I mean, I don’t know how many text messages I got along the lines of “a group is doing this here, the spectacle has been destroyed!” A few times I’d realize that the text messages were in reference to the place where I *was*, only to look around and see a quite different reality. The comms was like a whole media spectacle in itself! I guess it could be a moral boost to rewrite the events into some kind of inspiring magic, but I’m not sure it’s tactically great.

pannekoek said,

September 7, 2008 @ 9:37 pm

These things are getting very predictable which is why the State can crush these spectacles of opposition. An opposition to a State polical party which becomes a ritual act complete with sacrifice and martyrs. And we will spend the next 4 years in legal crap with getting those arrested out or supported if not. And who benefits from this?

It would be far better to ignore the State parties political gatherings altogether. Anarchists have no use for them. Let them be. Instead, we should engage in projects in our home areas that are positive and with sending out anarchist “missionaries” to areas of the country where our ideas have not reached.

everything4every1 said,

September 9, 2008 @ 3:36 am

I’m not from the US, but we face similar problems where I live. Here’s an idea I wish someone would try, DON’T SHOW UP TO WHERE ALL THE COPS ARE. A basic guerrilla strategy is to “hit them where the ain’t.”

Seems to me a good idea would be to plan a protest at the same time as the DNC & RNC, but not at those two events. Pick another place, maybe select Dem/Repub senators offices. Or pick one of the major backers of both parties and attack them with the logic that it’s really their convention that’s happening in St Paul, the D’s & R’s are just a subsidiary.

That way the state has to fork out the money for both protecting the conferences & also for stopping whatever you plan. Which won’t be as predict-able as what people are currently doing.

letters said,

September 9, 2008 @ 10:19 am

I have a lot of sympathy with the plight of the individuals now caught up in the aftermath. And yet an explicit critique of activism has been undertaken in the anarchist milieu for at least 9 years. Why have they refused to engage with that and critically evaluate their previous losses? As far as I can see there are two major disjunctions between their politics and their activities: the first concerns their own analysis of capitalism (at all levels), they have failed to articulate the precise co-ordinates of their own alienation, i.e. situate their experience within the present context, and therefore they have been unable to explain their motivations to themselves but instead have been forced to adopt a number of ‘roles and ‘gestures’ first identified by the SI more than forty years ago as ‘leftist’ and ‘spectacular’. Secondly, they have failed to articulate anybody else’s alienation and have thus pursued a logic of self-diminishment and isolationism – they dictate all terms of their ‘resistance’ (and thus recuperation) and have become unable to connect to anything but their own ideology. If they had proclaimed instead, ‘we are an autonomous uncontrollable expression of the capitalist relation – we revel in our incoherence, we can achieve nothing but the realization of our contradictory impulses in our own lives”, then fair enough, but then they would not have needed the Republican Party.

I would think making sure you don’t put your comrades in harm’s way would be the prime concern but it seems some of the anarchists want to keep throwing more and more bodies into the fray without any consideration of the cost. Let us be clear, here now about the reality and scale of the enemy; the present regime has killed more than a hundred thousand people in Iraq to defend the interest of capital, try and imagine the forces required to beat such desperation. A protest group cannot hope to take control of the streets from the state without massive popular mobilization, along with the structurally weakening effects of a major economic crisis (of which the mobilization would be an expression).

The point is ‘roles’ are assigned by the social relation and there was very little that the anarchists involved could have done to resist that, there was a hole (a holy role) which they had to fill. You could not stop them, influence them or otherwise participate except on the terms ascribed to you. Consider the aetiology of the ‘event’, and compare it to the aetiology of all events. Begin with the idea, look now at the advertising, the promise that something is going to happen, as the date gets closer, excitement increases (certain critical functions, and any alternatives, any chance of not ‘doing it’ has passed), the event has gained its own momentum, then it happens, there is the moment of it, and the slow realization that this didn’t change the world, it is J19, it is N30+1. And then there’s next year, some other event to latch on to, to fill up the horizon. The commodity character of all events exists as a substratum in the quantitative ‘organizing’ of events, whether it’s Christmas, the burning man festival, or a protest march or even just the prospect of a cup of coffee at a favorite cafe, or the purchase of a new shirt; there is anticipation, a culmination in a moment, a subsequent emptiness. It is not that these did not oppose capitalism well enough but that they only opposed it at a surface level; beneath the surface of their activity, the machinery of capital accumulation continued to turn. The point of ‘carnivals’ is the obscuring of deep relations by surface eruptions; there is always an after and the after is always a return.

magonistarevolt said,

September 11, 2008 @ 12:40 pm

To conventiongoer:
“there *weren’t enough anarchists there* to safely pull off a black bloc type action, so the small number that managed to get together just joined the only roving march that did have the numbers: funk the war.”

If you choose to define anarchist as those who dressed in black, then you are correct. Its myopia to your own comrades, and an unwillingness to try different tactics that is crippling your ideas of the St. Paul protests. Somehow you missed that anarchists also wear colors other than black.

But the problem on the ground was not that there was not enough for black bloc activity, but that there was no black bloc activity planned. Those who wanted to pull off mobile tactics with Funk the War were carefully asked to maintain the tone of Funk the War: wear bright colors and act like you are having fun. Do you know why? Because this has worked for Funk the War in the past. We have been able to trash recruiting centers, throw water balloons at cops, and plaster the lobbies of war profiteers with stickers and red paint. And we’ve done so with no arrests because the cops are looking for people dressed in black with angry eyes peeking out of their balaclavas. Show them hundreds of smiling kids who are dancing to pop music, and they stand down. The shame was that the people who joined Funk the War had no respect for maintaining this tone, and therefore it became easy for police to pick out “bad protesters” from “good” ones

“who had organized the march [...] were screaming, begging, pleading, and literally crying in an effort to get them to stop.”
ORLY? Isn’t that some manipulatively worded bullshit. For a time, the folks who wanted to break shit and the folks who wanted to dance had a symbiotic relationship, and the organizers were quite happy. This broke down somewhere in Sector 7 when the folks dressed in black decided it was time to run, leaving behind the folks who had to drag the sound system wagons. If you had bothered for three seconds to listen to the quite respectful requests of the Funk the War organizers, instead of assuming that we were peace police, you would have heard that Funk the War needed to move South, as we had discussed in plenty of meetings beforehand, toward our intended destination of Sector 2.

We wanted you to bring your energy downtown towards Kellogg, where the delegate buses were coming through. Hell, if you brought the ruckus there, instead of the empty streets of downtown, we could have gotten the RNC delegates teargassed. Instead, the folks who we implored to stop running North, literally yelled “FUCK YOU” in the face of the organizers, and continued on their serious business of flexing and getting chased around by the cops.

So the organizers of Funk the War went down to Kellogg by themselves, 15 strong instead of twenty times that (what we had at the outset, and what we had organized for), and proceeded to block delegates at the security perimeter. What we did with 15 people (along with the ~15 people in the pagan cluster) was described as “one of the most chaotic moments” by the New York Times, where we made a human chain and forced the delegates through a tiny foot-wide bottleneck between a 7 foot concrete planter and the concrete wall of a building. They had to shimmy against the wall with their hands up to get to their convention, being humiliated by 30 protesters who hurled insults and water at them.

Just think what could have happened if the antagonism between the anarchists posturing and wearing all black and the anarchists wearing flourescent colors and dancing was just enough less that we could have communicated our goals to one another. If half of the Funk the War crowd had stayed with the Funk the War organizers, those RNC delegates would likely have caught the tear gas and pepper spray used against the protesters later in the day, when most protesters finally did come down to Sector 2.

To letters:
Never confuse criticism (especially criticism as obtusely worded as yours) as replacement for participation. If you do, Instead of making history, you’ll just be in the audience judging it. And that is best left to stuffy Marxist academics, not anarchists.

@dam said,

September 11, 2008 @ 1:22 pm

rechelon–first, you realize that nearly ALL of the organizing that took place for the RNC strategies dealt with the first day of the conventions, and were centered around the predicted schedules of the RNC delegates, right? and you know that less than 24-hours prior to that day everyone had all planned for, the entire schedule was changed–which meant having one night to come up with entirely new plans, right?

as far as i’m concerned, the victories and goals that were initially sought after flew out the window when the schedule changed–and in light of all of that, we had many, many successes that came from it. ret’s analysis is spot on in saying that we at least posed a threat and successfully determined the face of the protests.

the preemptive raids also worked to our benefit a bit. instead of using a few broken windows to marginalize and discredit dissent in this country, the “violent” behavior was seen to many of the local residents as a logical response to police repression. not only that, but i personally saw would-be law-abiding citizens showing visible outrage at police(throwing things and swearing at them) and were generally sympathetic to anarchists. that is a big step forward in my book.

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