From Daybreak #6
PO Box 14007 Minneapolis MN 55414
www.daybreaknewspaper.org
daybreak (at) tao.ca


Every day, on every channel of media, the Iraq War rages on. Long after the huge protests have faded (is it a coincidence that they stopped around election time?) Americans and Iraqis are still dying. Saying ‘I told you so’ feels like such an empty victory. But let’s not be too hard on ourselves (we’re not Marxists or Christians after all). Not because we didn’t drop the ball by letting liberals co-opt the anti-war movement into a John Kerry stump speech, but because the ball, traditional demonstrations, was never really that useful of a tool to take on a war machine anyway. Even if the state machine collapsed tomorrow there would be a million petty dictators to step into its place. As long as the culture we’ve been trained in reproduces violence at every level of interaction any political actions of ours are useless unless we deal with the authoritarian culture that backs up the system. As revolutionaries we need to throw ourselves into the culture war that conservatives are always ranting about, to start putting out our lived values as a functioning alternative rather than relying on theory, rhetoric, and antiqued ritual. It would mean a partial shift in focus from purely political organizing to community organizing and a partial shift in perspective from focusing on the authorities to focusing on ourselves. By defining ourselves largely as a ‘protest movement’ we’ve focused on mediating our relationship to authoritarian institutions instead of going to the grassroots, the culture of how we treat each other, and building equality, or to use a different word, anarchy, from the ground up that can effectively confront and undermine authoritarian institutions.



In saner times, when people had beef with some illegitimate authority, they would gather together and either burn the motherfucker down or extract some sort of reparation from the authority. A protest is like a 100th generation photocopy of a good old fashioned king burning, where all the threat is extracted and all we are left with is an empty ritual that we keep on doing out of habit. The unspoken goal of anarchist protesters is not to lobby the authorities but to transform protests into liberating experiences or into insurrections that take down authorities. While it’s true that protesters can be very successful in chasing out authoritarian institutions by protest, it’s often overlooked that this occurs only in situations where power is physically threatened — like in Argentina where protesters stormed government buildings and actually bodily removed the officials. This doesn’t mean that violence is the single answer, but that these protests developed out of deeply held cultural values that offered sustained opposition stemming from fundamental critiques. These cultural values also manifest themselves in the Argentine workplace occupations and the wide public support for them.



The protest movement’s main problem is a severe lack of vision. Even if this war ends, the next will come soon enough. The authorities may become a little more reasonable for a limited amount of time, but they will never willingly dismantle the apparatus of violence that is the foundation, authoritarian society and government. The real problem is the system, which is violent on many levels – from one-on-one to country-against-country violence. Until we get rid of it, military wars will always exist and, worse yet, our social interactions will still be tinged with normalized violence and aggression. If we’re really radicals, then it makes a lot more sense to set our sights high – to tear the system apart, for example – than to stand outside in the cold with a sign until we’re jailed, or the governments and corporations of the world succeed in their nefarious plot to murder every living thing. But it’s more complicated than a mere cry for revolution. We need to face the fact that as revolutionaries, we were not raised in a vacuum and the culture inside of us is highly authoritarian. Therefore, we still need to make a conscious effort to interact in more anarchistic ways.



Every group of people on earth has a different culture with norms of interacting that have developed over time according to the circumstances faced. Humans are incredibly adaptable; we have very few definite cultural traits that anyone can agree on. We can be highly authoritarian or damn egalitarian and, obviously, as anarchists we want to push the culture towards more anarchistic relationships. This involves not only yelling ‘smash the state’ at riot cops or people locked in office cubicles (from hereon referred to as Dilberts) but by consciously promoting (and inventing) a culture through our daily lives. There are lots of things that we can do on the individual level to relate to the people we love more anarchisticly. They are the mundane points of process that nobody likes to hear about: speaking respectfully, discussing sexual and other forms of consent, and getting off your high horse once in a while, etc. If we can’t commit to adopting more egalitarian modes of communication in our own lives, then anarchistic interpersonal relationships will never become the norm. It is each of our personal responsibilities to lead by example, whether that means being a good listener or doing your god damned dishes!



But we also need to expand our expectations of the loose-knit community that already exists and put more emphasis on instilling lived values that are the antithesis of war and government-sanctioned murder. People need to support the temporary institutions that sustain our values in the face of the highly authoritarian culture. They’re pretty much the same as the projects you see listed on flyers now – free schools, infoshops, independent media, and groups that provide helpful services like Food Not Bombs and childcare. These institutions strengthen the community whose core values are opposed to authority and whose logical follow through is direct action. So it isn’t an either/or question of whether we should make direct action or build community. For so long we’ve skipped the middle step between action and theory and no wonder we’ve been stumbling. Culture is the step that nurtures the seedlings of both action and theory. Out of a lived and healthy egalitarian culture, resistance will naturally blossom.