you are right that i am not generous enough in my characterization of the irony in the words used in the article. please excuse my careless but note that it can also be read as highlighting the play left within the initial text which oscillates between a) a refusal of any category of radical subjectivity and b) a desire to still have a radical subjectivity despite an acknowledgement of its impossibility. i think references leap out throughout the text that indicate an unconscious desire of a radical class of individuals who will emerge to fight capital.

maybe what i intended to highlight the most is that the students desire (an unconscious, nearly impossible to articulate drive) was in the right place. when told by their school administration to not demonstrate, it provoked them to do so (known in everyday language as ‘reverse psychology’). the struggle for representing and articulating the events within the terms of the theater of traditional political protest (protestors, police, etc) will always fall short, there will never be formal categories to describe the level of self-organization and spontaneity necessary to combat the state.

the article poses opposing questions: 1) are the students taking part in their own repression or 2) are they challenging the state in their refusal to be part of sedimented forms of political protest (maybe in its generosity to others’ opinions, or maybe as a simple strawman [sic]). The article never goes on to conclude with the latter, though giving more ink. I was expressing my agreement for the latter statement, and giving it more context.

to emphasize the argument even more: anarchist mobilizations are useful but limit themselves by trying to brand them as specifically anarchist. it’s the unintended connections that are drawn in which ultimately make the mobilizations a success or not. whether it’s the outrage TV/internet news viewer beamed in over fiber optics [imc?], the unassuming spectator-turned-participant [pitt?], or the third world countries looking for a way out of the new trade bloc [wto] – anarchist strategy has never been about trench warfare with the cops. we could trot out example after example and what makes them successful is their ability to put into motion and intensify a whole assemblage of outside forces, of which the state and captains of industry are always trying to predict, contain, capture, and re-direct.

so yeah – no doubt the mobilization was necessary to get pitt involved. and we both agree, but i want to push it one step further — it’s all about thinking about the indirect, external connections that are held in ‘common’.

ps: the sustainability of the pitt students resistance or their “understanding what they were doing” probably doesn’t matter as much as we might wish. but that is what precarity is trying to get at (or spinoza/TCI’s resonance).

First, any CrimethInc. text that uses terms like “revolutionary subject” or “proletariat” does so with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Second, nobody here is arguing that anarchists should “keep on yelling at students.” Your suggestion that we should “figure out how to incorporate them into our strategy” sounds a little manipulative, though.

Myself, I’d argue that the important thing is to find common cause with others in resistance to capitalism and hierarchy. This involves violating the boundaries and categories of our society, yes, but it doesn’t stop there. There are plenty of ways people can challenge or transform their roles in society that don’t contribute at all to collective liberation: hence the value in articulating values.

It’s possible that simply by being present, the students were “provoking the cops in a meaningful way,” as you say. However, if they didn’t see themselves as doing so, but just happened to be positioned in such a way that this happened, that doesn’t offer a lot of promise that such a thing might happen again, or that it will necessarily produce liberating results.

If you read the above text closely, it isn’t a criticism of the students. It’s an argument that anarchists should have tried harder to connect with them on the basis of collective actions to resist the police, rather than on the basis of an individualized suffering at their hands.

As for the meaningless of anarchist summit mobilizations–the whole event would not have occurred had there not been a mobilization. We can agree that anarchists need to see ourselves as playing a minor role in a much bigger world, though.

one of the major projects undertaken in italy during the 70s was a radical rethinking of radical subjectivity. they reworked certain subject-positions that were rather passe or bourgeois (student, leisure class, non-worker) and theorized how they could be re-articulated in radical way in order to facilitate a critical understanding among those identified as part of those groups.

there is now a burgeoning body of literature, concepts, and movements that is an outgrowth of this rethinking. it calls itself “precarity” – the idea that marginalized subjectivities aren’t victims who needs protection and rights (ie: recognition), but actually categories that can be emptied out in refusal of the position that was forced onto them.

what makes this move so radical is that it’s not liberal “reclaiming” of categories or proselytizing about one-size-fits-all subject-positions (anarchist, for example). RATHER, it’s finding ways to rearticulate the things people are ALREADY doing in ways to transform the positions (and figure out new ways of solidarity, political behavior, types of association, etc etc).

a quick read of pitt makes this point clear. the students may have created the most antagonistic and radical outcome:

*the possibilities that emerge from what the anarchists did is minimal — smashy smashy is nothing new and compared the massive influx of money coming into the city, it’s utilitarian/functional effect was pretty minimal. this is not a slight for the institution building or the cultural imagination that was expanded as a direct result of a large “presence” in the city – but the usual functional metrics used by anarchists (PD [property destruction], blockades, arrests, working-class solidarity, etc) neither met the necessary conditions for a radical rupture nor really challenged politics as usual. of course there was anarchist infrastructure built – but who in the world really cares about anarchist administration, bureaucracy, and logistics (another anarchist franchise project is possible)??

*guess what people have been talking about when discussing g20pitt? the police riots against the pitt students (not old anarchist summit reruns). the students show the ever-growing possibility of groups not otherwise defined as political niche groups (anarchists, socialists, dems) who otherwise found themselves caught within the pincers of state control. modern policing has wet dreams about keeping repression specifically focused on those groups, knowing that the ideological web surrounding niche group activity is strong enough to capture and control any justification produced for protesting outside the channels set out by the political system.

their asses were in the right place, everything else can follow. the failure of marxist movements of the last 150 years demonstrates the failure of german idealism, which thought that the ideas of ideology were what transformed material conditions. politics of purity is the game the vanguardists play. anarchists should know better — regardless of the students see themselves, they were there provoking cops in a meaningful way. our role is not to define the right categories other should put themselves in, but to figure out the roles they already inhabit and create ways to re-articulate the actions in ways that build solidarities and affinities.

but then again, if we just want to play “more revolutionary than thou” or “more punker than thou” we can keep on getting yelling at students rather than figuring out ways to incorporate them into our strategy.