Following Up

So remember when I had beautiful ideas of writing a lot more in here? Well, suddenly this thing called the Ar-En-Cee showed up, and all of a sudden all I was doing was working to make it a success. But I've found a few moments (at work, typically) to write something.

Last night, around 2 am (I couldn't get to sleep, thanks to a combination of the dark liquid of the imperialist lords [Coca-Cola] and too many naps during the day) I heard a man in the street yelling profanities for about an hour. He was disturbed, or under the influence of drugs, or something, but he was definitely in need of assistance and didn't feel good.

The problem with anarchist theory is that its far too often separated from anarchist reality. I couldn't decide what to do to help this man. The logic of the state encouraged me to call the police, who could potentially give him the help he needed. But we all know the track record of the cops with mentally ill/confused people is pretty dismal and all-too-often ends with shots fired and a note on page B5.

The platitudes about "community" that we hear (and say) often in the anarchist movement would encourage me to go out and talk to the man, as part of the community. But my neighbors were clearly not doing anything and I'm a pretty small guy. Hearing stories from my father, who has worked with the mentally ill for many years, makes me pretty reluctant to simply venture out onto a dark street and jump into a potentially dangerous situation.

So what's an anarchist to do?

I've been trying to figure out what kind of social mechanisms would be most effective to deal with these kind of situations. After all, for most of the world, it is these bread-and-butter issues that matter most. Ostensibly, the practicality and common sense of anarchism is supposed to be most effective at solving these problems, in a way that Marxism or liberalism are ineffective and too conceptual to do.

My last post discussed the Provos and their penchant for the absurd. They also had a penchant for the absolutely practical. Their "White Plans" could serve as real models of utopian plans that could really work. The White Bicycle plan, which has been co-opted in a few cities and functions less effectively than if under popular direction, was for the center of Amsterdam to be closed to cars and for 20,000 white bicycles to be given out for public use.

One White Plan, the White Chicken plan, has been obsessing me in the last few weeks, as I imagine how it would work. After their happenings and gatherings began to create a police backlash with tremendous brutality, Provo suggested that the role of the police would be redesigned ("chicken" is the Dutch equivalent of our epithet "pig," with the cops being popularly known as "blue chickens") to fit the needs of an egalitarian society. The cops would be disarmed, given chocolate bars, chicken drumsticks, and condoms, and have friendly white uniforms. The police would be elected.

Obviously, the idea of suddenly switching our cops, addicted to power and violence as most of them are, to become anarcho-social workers is silly. But the model of the White Chicken is ultimately one I find quite compelling. What if, rather than tossing and turning with guilt for not assisting my fellow man, I could call up the White Chickens (or whatever we'd call them) who could come and actually help him? Rather than the liberal reaction of trusting the armed and dangerous cops to "help" people who they're trained to control, what if a society could actually help people?

All this gets me thinking, and actually returns me to James Herod's Getting Free and the idea of creating anarchist projects that transform our communities and make them democratic, anarchist communities. Where Provo failed was its inability to transcend its subculture (avant-garde hipsters and the odd angry youth) and become effective in implementing its programs. It also didn't help that they decided to run for city council in order to put their plans in motion. Anarchists certainly do a lot of programs that offer direct mutual aid to people (Food Not Bombs, etc). But maybe it's time for us to think about new programs we could implement to build anarchist communities. I feel like our ideological commitment to those projects may be blinding us to the fact that free food is not the end-all of mutual aid. Let's imagine what our ideal community would look like and start building ways to make it happen.

Welcome to the Terrordome

Via Al Jazeera:
"Food riots have erupted in Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Haiti in the past month. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to avoid food being seized from fields and warehouses"

Wake up, First World, the global South is knocking at the door. And it's got a bone to pick with you.

On the line

Okay, so here I am again. I long ago decided that blogs were too indulgent and were part of our culture of individualist consumerism (as opposed to individualist creativity). But I've reconciled my concerns with my need to a. write and develop my rhetorical skills and b. not use Facebook for this. So I hope to make sure I only tell stories and write analysis. I refuse to give up my personality to a machine. With that in mind, on to my experiences:

I was raised in a family that was sympathetic to labor. My folks are middle class workers. I should qualify that statement by suggesting that we're "middle class but if my dad got sick we'd be out on the street" as opposed to "middle class being a polite way of saying rich". There is a tremendous difference between those two positions, one which is not expressed in the term "middle class".

But they'd never felt that they wanted to improve their working conditions. Today I participated in my first picket and it was quite an experience. Standing on the line at the University of Minnesota, blocking trucks from delivering while AFSCME workers are out was pretty enlightening and empowering. I was at the lines with few deliveries so I didn't get into the real confrontational stuff that happened at other docks. But no deliveries passed our blockade. What's more is that the drivers who I talked to understood what we were doing and voluntarily turned around. The paper delivery guy who could have just walked by us decided he would rather turn around.

There's something powerful about meeting other people in a setting where you are not supposed to be doing something. Whether it is a protest against the war or a picket fighting the monster of global capitalism, there's a devious feeling that you're doing something sneaky and "bad" as the bourgeois call it, and the folks you are with are in it with you. A little conspiracy of regular folks.

So today on the line, I chatted with the most interesting people. When your average person thinks of "union workers" I suspect they think of an overweight white guy with a cap sitting on his ass. Which is unfortunate. On the line today we had quite a variety of characters. An old Teamster who told us horror stories of union bureaucracy and vote rigging and wished he wasn't retired or he'd join the IWW, a Ph.D. in geography who worked as a library tech because the accreditation system said he needed to have a Library Science degree to be a "real" librarian, a single mom, on strike, who rides Critical Mass and wore a shirt declaring "Cars R Coffins".

There's a lot of anti-worker rhetoric that flies around the anarchist movement these days. A lot of it comes from people who don't work because they don't want to, or don't work because they don't have to. And that ticks me off.

My buddy has a phrase: ABC. Anything But Class. Which seems to be a problem in our movement. We can recognize oppressions based on race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, ability, environmental destruction, etc. We even start talking about the inherent oppressiveness of language or speciesism and weirdo stuff like that. I feel like in overreaction to the terror of the Soviet Union, anarchists have forgotten the problem of class. Sure, some anarchists from working class backgrounds will recognize the fact that class is a problem, both in society and in our community, but they refuse to organize to DO anything about it. They just organize around empowering workers in the community. Well, sure, that's part of it. But we need a movement of workers at large to change society.

People like to shit on Marx these days, and sometimes with good reason. Nonetheless, his thinking on the nature of humanity as productive and creative continues to strike me as dangerously anarchistic (Bakunin: the urge to destroy is also a creative urge). And I've never been more pleased to call myself a human being than when I've been in places like today, doing what little I can to help improve the lives of my fellow humans. 5 am is pretty early to get up in the morning, but if the class war rages then, I guess I'll be there.