I Love Trash : a reply to Michael Albert

I am writing this in response to what I believe is the main issue Michael Albert has raised regarding trashing in Seattle. His views can be found in "Reply to the ACME Collective" [http://www.zmag.org/replytoacme.htm], "On Trashing and Movement Building" [http://www.zmag.org/on_trashing.htm], "Who Owns the Movement?" [http://www.zmag.org/who_owns.htm] and elsewhere.

Albert explains a number of times that he is not against trashing per se. He believes trashing can be justified given the right set of circumstances. What are these circumstances? What determines whether trashing is justified?

This is how Albert frames the context in which he decides whether trashing is justified: "the time and place for such behavior is when it will meet with widespread approval."

Certainly, the trashers approve of their own actions and think them effective, else they would not do it. But their reasons why no longer matter. Instead, the important questions become these: Who gets to decide whether trashing is justified or not? Who controls this judgement? And do anarchists have a right to trash at demos where nobody else thinks it's effective?

Justification of trashing thus becomes a discussion of where power lies within the movement. For Albert, this power lies with the majority. He argues the Seattle trashing did not meet with widespread approval, and was therefore ineffective and unjustified. He goes on to accuse the trashers of "undemocratically violat[ing] the agenda of [the] massive demonstrations." In his posted responses to email on the subject, he portrays the trashing as 100 militants hijacking a demonstration of 70,000.

Really, this is putting the cart before the horse. In actuality, Albert is trying to justify a tyranny of 70,000 telling 100 militants what is and is not permitted at a demonstration.

Albert charges us with being undemocratic. The anarchist response must be: But of course. We are anarchists, not majoritarians.

Presumably, Albert is not a pure democrat. He certainly indicates at times that people have rights which majorities cannot overrule. He even says, "It doesn't make any more sense to say that a large mass of protestors can dictate all ways that anyone can organize against the WTO…than to say that a large mass of the population of Seattle or the U.S. can dictate whether there is a demonstration at all."

Yet, in an infuriatingly contradictory manner, his criticisms of trashing all come to rely on a majority dictating protest terms to minorities in the movement: "It was only when some went off breaking windows against the demonstration's norms that a problem arose."

Nor does he restrict his majoritarian rule to instances of property damage. He includes civil disobedience and even mere marching among the tactics that can be "out of place."

In one paragraph, he says it's wrong for the governments of Seattle or the U.S. to ban demonstrations and prevent people from exercising their rights.

And then he builds his case against trashing on the premise that it's wrong to exercise your rights if most people don't think you should.

Well, most people in the Seattle demonstrations wore clothes. Most people are straight. Mainstream America is uncomfortable with open homosexuality. Mainstream America eats meat. By Albert's logic, bare-breasted Lesbian Avengers carrying signs reading "Eat pussy, not cows" were wrong to express themselves in such a fashion. No doubt nudity and cunnilingus served to alienate at least as many people as trashing. Like trashing, this "did not cause more substantive information to be conveyed either in the mainstream or on the left". Like the trashers, they "divert attention from real issues" - or at least what the majority considers real issues. No doubt Albert wishes they also had stayed home.

No doubt the Vietnam War could have been halted a lot earlier if the protestors just stayed "clean for Gene" instead of upsetting ordinary Americans with their long hair and freaky clothes.

No doubt the lunch counter sit-ins upset a lot of people who were sympathetic to Civil Rights as long as blacks behaved themselves and asked politely for freedom…

You can see what this kind of thinking will end in. A nation of sheep.

I find Albert's arrogance astounding and frightening. When Albert and the non-anarchist Left propose the creation of a no-trashing-protest zone around downtown Seattle, I fail to see the moral difference between this and the government's actual creation of a not-any-protest zone in the same space.

Albert's approach to the struggle for freedom and justice is fundamentally anti-freedom and unjust. For the good of the activist whole, the minority should submit to the will of the majority. Why? Because failing to do so is "to dramatically violate norms." Don't exercise your right to trash, because the majority don't want you to, and trashing "undermines any sense of democracy." For Albert, the only reason trashing is wrong is because a majority say it's wrong.

Here we have the principle of authority rearing its ugly head. As Robert Paul Wolff says, in his masterful book "In Defense of Anarchism": "Authority is the right to command and correlatively, the right to be obeyed. It must be distinguished from power, which is the ability to compel compliance, either through the use or threat of force…To claim authority is to claim the right to be obeyed."

Albert has no power, but he is claiming authority, on behalf of the non-anarchist Left. On what grounds does he claim this authority to judge anarchist tactics? On the grounds that there's more non-anarchists than there are anarchists. Might makes right. The very same reasons the police and the soldiers and the WTO and all the capitalists and all the governments always give for their own determinations of what will and will not be permitted.

I dissent. I believe that I have rights, inalienable rights, which cannot be abrogated by any majority. I believe self-defense is an inalienable right. I believe the property damage in Seattle is valid economic self-defense regardless of whether it made the non-anarchist Left happy or not. My rights are nonexistent the moment you tell me I should only exercise some of them when it's convenient for your movement. I am an individual, not merely the means to an end defined by you. You can criticize my actions for many reasons, but don't criticize me on the grounds that my actions are unpopular. I don't accept your authority.

Albert claims "coherence, trust, and solidarity are not furthered when small groups undemocratically violate the agenda of massive demonstrations to pursue their private inclinations." I want a revolution precisely so that I can pursue my private inclinations. Coherence, trust, and solidarity are not furthered when one group - even if numerically the largest group - presumes to set the agenda for everyone and expects everyone to abide by its terms. To update Emma Goldman: "If I can't trash, I don't want to be a part of your revolution."

Albert criticizes trashers a number of times for "counter productive window breaking." He says their organizational skills would have been better put to use helping fellow demonstrators avoid police violence. This would have been "more courageous (and better politics) than endangering others by providing a pretext for more police violence."

Again, we see Albert's arrogance, telling people the best way to protest. We can play games about what we "should" have done forever. But the odds of discovering the single best thing to do in any given situation are small indeed. One could almost always have done something better. Albert's time, for instance, might be better spent demonstrating in the streets than writing essays criticizing anarchists. People demonstrating in the Seattle streets might do better if they picked a different issue, or worked in a different country. Who really knows? I prefer to say that if it's not wrong, it's right. Albert seems to be saying if you could have done something better, you should have, and if you didn't, you did wrong. But as an anarchist, I believe I have no obligation to do anything, apart from refraining from harming other people. And I don't believe we can quantify which is better - smashing a shop or staring down the cops - it's up to each person to decide for themselves how they would like to be involved in the movement. If we all do our own thing, eventually we'll get around to doing everything.

Also, it is just plain wrong for Albert to say anarchists "endanger[ed] others by providing a pretext for more police violence. Does he also say the DAN activists blocking the streets endangered everybody by providing the initial pretext for police violence? No. It's simply ridiculous to hold people responsible for the actions of others they have no control over. This misplaced blame only provokes further repression and asks us to cut our own throats. Today we can't trash because the police say they will beat and gas non-trashing protestors. Tomorrow we can't march because police say they will beat and gas non-marching bystanders. That's condoning the logic of hostage-takers. If the cops threaten to beat the shit out of me until Albert stops publishing drivel, apparently I can send Albert my medical bills after his next essay comes out.

Albert employs another argument against the trashers, in case they fail to be convinced that the only way to win freedom is to refrain from asserting their rights until the results of the tactical popularity contest are in. Ironically, for someone claiming to be from the Left, it's the argument of property rights.

Although his essay "Who Owns the Movement?" includes in its subtitle the phrase "No one owns the movement," Albert continually cedes a controlling interest to the non-trashing Left.

Albert talks in detail of an approach to demonstrations "that permits each constituency to act on its ideals and logic, but without diminishing or confusing the actions of others much less usurp the zones others occupy." This lip service to "participatory self-management" becomes transparent as you focus on what's behind the pretty language: his conception of "zones." Zones which should not be usurped, confused, or diminished by outsiders. In other words, the movement has zones and these zones belong to specific factions in the movement.

Trashing was bad, so the reasoning goes, because anarchists encroached on other peoples' zones. Five yard penalty, repeat first down. Although trashing has always been on the table for the militant anarchists, apparently downtown Seattle had been "zoned" for no trashing. I wonder when that was decided. I wonder who decided that. I wonder who has the authority to decide that, and where they got that authority.

Albert presents us with an interesting trashing alternative: it might have been OK if the trashers took off after Boeing, much like the labor rally was held far away from the street occupations. How far away is enough, Albert? A half block, two blocks isn't good enough, I guess. Who gets to decide? Anarchists have always planned to come to Seattle and demonstrate near the convention center and smash things. Telling them to go elsewhere certainly sounds like you're defining the owners of the movement (hint: it isn't the anarchists!)

Further revelations about movement ownership follow. "For a relatively miniscule number of participants to impose on a massive demonstration tactics contrary to its definition was undemocratic behavior that should be transcended in the future."

"Its" definition. Seemingly a neutral term. But a demonstration doesn't have a definition of itself. Only the people involved in demonstrations do. The "miniscule" number of trashing participants, then, carried a definition of the demonstration different from the majority. The only basis on which to disregard the validity of this definition is to subtract the trashers from decision-making power. This can be done two ways. First, to deny that they are a "real" part of the demonstration. They "hitch[ed] a ride on a massive event, violating majority norms and imposing [their] own very sharply contrary tactical aims on others." These hitchhikers don't belong here at all. Even though they've planned on coming from the start and consider it just as much "their" demonstration as anyone else's. Or, secondly, they are a minority, "miniscule." And of course as a minority they can be overruled by a majority even though (silly me) I thought we all had a right to protest.

We see the anarchists eliminated again in this sentence: "Breaking windows was not a demonstration agenda item." Obviously, for the trashers, it was an agenda item. What Albert should say is that, for a majority, it was not. The right to dissent apparently does not extend to the right to dissent about the nature of dissent. Attempts to do so will result in your erasure by the peace police.

Again: "To take advantage, by violating those aspirations…" Which aspirations? Whose aspirations? Anarchists aren't allowed their own aspirations, they can only "violate" the aspirations of the majority, which are conveniently phrased as the only existing desires.

In short, the trashing "undermines any sense of democracy." Well, not any sense. Just Albert's strict majoritarian sense. And that's something any anarchist should be proud to undermine.

Anarchists do not believe in majority rule. Anarchists believe in consensus. In the absence of consensus, we will act as we please, reciprocally respecting the autonomy of others.

If the movement is collective property, what should the anarchist attitude towards it be? In the absence of consensus, and unwilling to submit to majoritarian rule, how should we preserve this property? One principle to follow is Locke's proviso and leave "enough and as good left in common for others." Was this done in Seattle?

Albert uses the language of force, of control, when discussing the trashers. He says trashers "unilaterally transform[ed] the events" and "impos[ed] one's own very sharply contrary tactical aims on others against their intentions." This is rank hyperbole intended to cast majoritarian tyranny as a defensive response to minority terror.

This language is crafted to show that the trashers came to the demo and took it out of the hands of everyone else, treating it as their private property.

But the trashers didn't impose anything on anybody. The trashers did not accost civil disobedience people and demand they loot Starbucks. They did not force anyone to set a garbage can on fire. They did not prevent any non-trashers from protesting in their own fashion. On the contrary, the trashers were the ones set upon by other demonstrators, verbally harangued, and physically prevented from expressing their ideas of a demonstration in the space of downtown Seattle.

A demonstration is an idea manifested in a space. It is tangible property only insofar as the space is tangible. The trashers' actions therefore did not detract from the actions of other activists in any tangible manner. Various people (cops, bystanders, other demonstrators, the public at large) chose to form opinions of the demonstration. But these opinions are the products and responsibilities of the people making them, not of the anarchists. As, for instance, the racism of white flight must be laid strictly at the door of the man forming an opinion about his new neighbor of color.

I submit that "enough and as good" was left by the trashers for others in the common property of the Seattle demos, as for the most part there was nothing for them to take. They certainly didn't arrogate intellectual ownership of the event the way that Albert and the anti-trashers did.

In regards to the physical, rather than conceptual space of the demonstrations: as few as they were, and as mobile as they were, the trashers' only tangible damage was to the class enemy and stands justified as economic self-defense. To play the devil's advocate, the same care of common property cannot be said to have been taken by the non-trashing demonstrators. After all, they superimposed their idea of the demonstration on top of many other legitimate ideas already occupying the same space - people trying to shop, trying to get to work, etc., who were prevented from doing so by the masses of unmoving civil disobedience activists. On the face of it, the non-trashers detracted more from the commons than the trashers.

My support for trashing is not intended to be vanguardist. I have no illusions that breaking a few windows will usher in the world revolution. I don't intend to provoke the cops in order to radicalize the masses. I do not believe property violence is the only way to succeed. I don't ask that all demonstrators drop everything and start looting; and I don't call them tools of the system when they don't. I recognize that there are a multiplicity of ways of resisting. I merely see property damage as a legitimate part of the struggle. And I don't pretend ownership of the movement.

I would like to see the same respect extended from the other side. I don't tell you how to protest, so don't claim the authority to tell me. The right idea is not necessarily the one with the most adherents. I had hoped the Left understood this by now. The success of the Seattle protests depended in large part on anarchist-friendly conceptions of action - affinity groups and coordination, not command and control; unpredictability; nonviolent direct action. It comes as a great disappointment to me that individual autonomy is still seen as a threat to the "movement" - as if there were a movement apart from the desires of all the individuals who call it home. You have said that the trashing undermines trust and solidarity. I can think of no trust more perfect, no solidarity more complete, than that of the international anarchist tendency which time and time again has thrown its support to movements that continually betray it and blame it, turning freedom's march into tyranny's detour. But we will keep on fighting alongside you, until at last you escape authority's grasp. Dare to struggle, dare to win.

Impulse '99

(Note: I used the terms "anarchists" and "trashers" interchangeably. Although not all anarchists are trashers, and not all trashers are anarchists, I did this because I am defending trashing from an anarchist perspective and it seemed unwieldy to keep referring to the "portion of anarchists who are trashers" and vice-versa. Also, because Albert's essay was directed at the anarchist trashers of the ACME collective.)