Atom Feed for 'protest' Articles

Homelessness and the Desecration of Democracy in Denver, Colorado

2020-08-07T15:27:42Z

Denver Municipal Code § 38-86.2 — known locally as the ‘urban camping ban,’ enacted by the City Council in 2012 (in a vote of 9-4) — makes it unlawful for any person to sleep on public property with a blanket or “any form of cover or protection from the elements other than clothing.” But there are hundreds of people living in Denver who have nowhere else to sleep, and must nevertheless sleep and shelter themselves, who are therefore made criminals by the municipal code and treated as such by the police (a July 17, 2020, count found 1,328 people living in tents in Denver).

Such an inhumane law has resulted in some organized political resistance, of course. In 2019 volunteers coordinating through an organization called Denver Homelessness Out Loud managed to get a referendum (Initiative 300, the “Right to Survive” Initiative) on the ballot, bypassing the council in favour of direct democracy. If accepted by voters, the initiative would have made it legal in Denver “to rest and shelter oneself from the elements in a non-obstructive manner in outdoor public spaces.” The potential protection of such an essential freedom was apparently too much for Denver’s business community which launched a campaign, endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce, to oppose the measure. That campaign spent $2.4 million to try to convince Denver voters that acts of survival by some of the already least advantaged citizens should remain criminal acts (compare to the $0.1 million spent by supporters of the measure). That campaign was successful, and on election day the Right to Survive initiative was rejected by voters 81%-19%.

If democracy, the “rule of the people,” means anything of substance, then it can’t mean mere majoritarianism and instead must refer to a society which, in the words of Kevin Carson, tries to “maximize the agency of individual people, and their degree of perceived control over the decisions that affect their daily lives.” I’d go farther and say that any worthwhile version of democracy is one guided by something like a Rawlsian difference principle whereby social and economic institutions work “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”

An examination of any actually-existing democratic society will make it clear that by those standards democracy is a lie. The United States of America is both the revolutionary birthplace of liberal democracy with its dreams of republican equality as well as one of the world’s foremost engines of inequality. American politics is dominated by two political parties which in their rivalry never imagine a world outside of a struggle over the spoils of capitalism. The two American parties, appropriately called the Republican Party and Democratic Party, mirror the double lie of democracy itself: the promised “rule of the people,” a fair society in which we have a say over our own circumstances, is a false promise; but so too is its less lofty illusion as “rule of the majority.” Would-be cynics hold their lanterns up to democracy and declare that it is in fact nothing more than mob rule, a majority of wolves caucusing with a few sheep over lunch plans. But in practice even this cynical view is optimistic and democracies tend instead toward oligarchy, the rule of the few on behalf of a privileged class.

The case of Denver’s Right to Survive initiative being rejected by an overwhelming 81% of voters might seem like a counter-example to the charge of oligarchy. I’ll concede that any electoral system that allows Denver’s wealthy residents to decide the fate of the homeless is like polling the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah to decide how strangers should be treated; it immediately puts the lie to any pretensions of a just rule of the people. But even in this egregious case of democratic-process-as-mob-violence, the oligarchic tendency of democracy is visible in the background. Looking at the election numbers shows that less than half of active, registered voters in Denver cast a ballot on the issue. The defeat of the initiative was the result of a hateful minority, whipped up by a campaign funded by business owners, to preserve oppressive legislation originally enacted by nine city council members.

Eight years (and counting) of the urban camping ban has not reduced homelessness in Denver, but it has exposed some of Denver’s most disadvantaged residents to increased stress, danger, and police harassment. More recently, amidst a nation-wide rebellion against murderous police and a pandemic-fueled recession, Colorado’s capital has been rocked by protests and shifting homeless encampments as city police sweep one location after another. In June Colorado Governor and millionaire Jared Polis opted not to renew an emergency moratorium on evictions. After protests against police in Aurora (Denver’s most populous suburb), the governor also re-opened an investigation into the 2019 killing of Elijah McClain, an unarmed black man who was attacked and killed by police while walking near his home. The officers involved in McClain’s death remain at large, and protests are ongoing as I’m writing this.

By July the state capitol building and other state property in Denver were marked by substantial vandalism and encroached by growing tent cities. In response to questions about these scenes during a press conference, Governor Polis pressured the city to grant authority for his state troopers to help enforce the urban camping ban and likewise encouraged city police “to come onto our property and remove tents.” The city immediately granted the requested authority and a few days later state troopers effected a sweep of the homeless camp in front of the capitol building.

During the press conference, the governor offered these words to emphasize the importance of more aggressive policing:

It’s not just a building. It’s a big part of our Republic. It’s who we are. It’s our state Capitol. It’s symbolic. It’s important. And frankly, when it is desecrated, we all are desecrated and democracy is desecrated.

Governor Polis reveals here the actual content of democracy: sacrosanct symbols of state power elevated above struggling human life. If ever there can be a society in which individuals have a real say over the management of their own affairs and in which our economic and political institutions benefit the worst off the most, it begins with the desecration of this present democracy. “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

On 'Supporting' Riots and Looting

2020-06-09T16:47:30Z

Revolutionaries are pious folk. The revolution is not a pious event.

— Alfredo M. Bonanno

I’ve come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already ablaze!

— Jesus

My engagement with political protest has been limited to a few instances of peaceful protest and light civil disobedience. I was arrested during the Occupy movement while protesting the criminalization of homelessness and the corresponding murder of homeless men by police (see “When Police Kill the Homeless”). If I had to draw a single lesson from that experience to share with novice protesters, it would be to reject the naive notion that civil disobedience requires submitting to arrest. Even more overwhelming to the authorities than mass arrest is mass protest successfully avoiding arrest to re-convene in locations not controlled by police. Everybody already knows about the abuses of the criminal justice system, and many simply don’t care. Your arrest will not change their mind. There is no social contract to uphold. There is no one with a conscience left to whom Thoreauvian tactics could hope to appeal. Be water.

As the past two weeks of protest sparked by the murder of George Floyd has demonstrated, vandalism and confrontations with police are a much more effective means than mere noncooperation for winning reforms. It might be tempting to discount the contributions of riots to the success of the current protests and attribute it instead to pre-existing favour for police reforms. However, as reflected in recent Civiqs.com surveys (see snapshot of graph), public support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased sharply after rioting began in Minneapolis (see also “How Public Opinion Has Moved on Black Lives Matter” in The New York Times).

As time goes on, especially if property damage continues, protesters can expect a decline in popular support along with some backlash from white nationalist groups and pacifying political concessions in the form of ineffectual or never-implemented reforms. But regardless of how the current unrest eventually winds down, these riots have already made important gains which would be difficult to overestimate: the new baseline action for future protests is now burning down police precinct headquarters, and the new baseline demand is defunding or abolishing police departments (see “How Much Do We Need The Police?” which is one of many interviews with the author of The End of Policing now being published in mainstream media.)

So is “supporting” riots — unruly protest, vandalism, and looting — against police brutality justified? I use quotation marks around the word because my thoughts here are not about supporting protesters with food, drink, a place to rest, comfort and companionship, bail funds, legal counsel, or anything of that sort (but see "Here’s Where You Can Donate to Help Protests Against Police Brutality"). Instead it is about the much more pressing (🙄) issue of how to tell people like your facebook friends that you think the riots are justified without backing yourself into some moral corner where you are inadvertently praising circumstances where innocent people are being hurt or robbed.

The first thing is to establish the context within which we are using the words riot and looting. Everything in this essay is directly inspired by the black liberation protests against police violence in the United States, especially the Ferguson unrest in 2014 and the George Floyd protests of 2020, including clashes with police and commercial property damage that occurred during those protests. The connotation of riot and associated looting meant here is that which takes place during those and similar uprisings. Looting in the classical sense is stealing from a civilian population during an armed conflict, and that is specifically not what is being discussed here. It is possible that political and vigilante violence committed during times of civil unrest may try to disguise or justify itself as riots, but such massacres are not what I mean by riot (see for example, the Tulsa race “riot”). Also not discussed here are sports riots, though those are an interesting corner case worthy of a future essay.

In short, it is possible to recognize riots and looting as justified reaction to racist policing and class society without supporting every act that occurs during or under cover of riots. Not only that, such a stance is probably the only defensible position. To deny that riots are justified is to elevate the relatively minor crimes that flourish during riots above the incomparably greater crimes of the police and prevailing politico-economic norms (see “On Camels, Liberal Myths, and Ferguson”). But to pretend that riots and looting are completely blameless is to ignore the pain of real victims of property damage and opportunist assaults; it is to mistake looting as an end rather than a means and to mistake a mob mentality for autonomy.

In general it is unrealistic to expect revolutionary rigor from riotous anger as it is directed by police away from legitimate targets and seized upon by opportunists to commit their petty crimes of selfishness. But while the process at times is unnecessarily disordered, including actions that deserve no apology, it should not cause us to forget that the dis-ordering of current society is necessary.

Riots, people standing up against abusive police, are raw politics: when all of the safety valves and obfuscations of the superstructure fail, riots are the final recourse of a population facing intolerable oppression. Smashing storefront windows and other vandalism carried out during political protest is a non-violent way to illustrate the vulnerability of the existing regime (see “You are not the Target Audience” by William Gillis). Those boarded up retail shops currently visible in almost every major US city are proof that business as usual does not need to continue, a point especially underscored in riots taking place during pandemic quarantines which have revealed the pointlessness of so much of the work and rent that shackles many of us for a lifetime (see “66 Days” by Joshua Clover).

The act of looting itself is a challenge to the white supremacy historically intertwined with American conceptions of property and policing (see “In Defense of Looting” by Vicky Osterweil). More practically, and at the same time more theoretically, looting simultaneously satisfies material needs and breaks the spell of an economic system ruled by commodities in which we are all trapped. A necessity obtained for free is invaluable to anybody, but probably nobody knows better than a looter that a luxury obtained for free is worthless.

People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. […] Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take […]

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. (See “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” by Guy Debord.)

On the Gilets Jaunes riots

2018-12-15T07:19:21Z

May 1968: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.”
November 2018: “The elites worry about the end of the world while we worry about the end of the month.”

In an interview he gave to CNN last September, French president Emmanuel Macron was confident that his proposed neoliberal reforms would weather any protest “Because I was very clear during my campaign about the reforms. I explain these reforms. I presented this reform during weeks and weeks and I was elected under the reforms. I do believe in democracy. And democracy is not in the street.”

The fact that he only won in a runoff election against a Fascist-adjacent candidate in one of the least popular elections in recent French history doesn’t seem to have worried the young investment banker.

Now, after four weeks of riotous street protests across France, he has recanted, not only withdrawing some of the least popular tax reforms but also promising an increase of the minimum wage. Gilets Jaunes protesters continue to call for his resignation.

“Democracy is not in the street.”

The Gilets Jaunes protests, in case you’ve not read about them yet, are so called because of the yellow safety vests (gilets jaunes) French motorists are required to keep in their cars and which have been adopted as a symbol and uniform by many of the protest participants. The unrest initially coalesced against a small but regressive ‘ecotax’ on diesel fuel meant to curtail carbon emissions and combat climate change.

While the populist (grassroots, leaderless, containing heterogeneous political impulses from the far-right to the far-left) nature of the movement has lead to divergent interpretations, Joshua Clover has concisely described it as “a textbook riot.” Not simply because of the smashing and the looting, or the flipping of cars and setting them on fire. But as a working-class struggle against the rising cost of living which quite consciously targets the economic circulation pressure points: roundabouts and tollbooths.

The imagination of some liberals and social democrats is so limited by the republican capitalist order within which they dwell that they can’t get over the anti-tax demands of the protesters (who have already long moved past them) or understand what would motivate such protest. For these liberals, capitalism is the extent of their imagined world and taxes make it bearable — progressive taxes through which social democratic programs have been made possible are conflated in their minds with taxes in general. But fortunately the French people recognized the fuel tax for what it was: yet one more austerity measure by which the owning classes, who trash the planet in pursuit of profit, could shift the blame and the repair bill to the working class. “In overturning cars the yellow vests are symbolically overturning the entire Cartesian premise of France. This is not merely against the authoritarian Macron but a revolt against the centuries old republican order.”

And of course riots are difficult for many people to accept; mistaking the status quo as ‘peace’ and insurrection as somehow more violent than the system it revolts against is a natural habit to fall into and can be difficult to escape outside of an apocalyptic experience. So they continue to strain at the gnat of street violence while swallowing the camel of structural violence.

But there has also been hand wringing on the left, especially in the first couple weeks, because of the far-right elements participating in the demonstrations. To be sure, nationalists and fascists thrive on these moments of anger, déclassement, and popular resentment toward global elites. The gilets jaunes also seem to be getting the approval from Trumpists and other English-speaking right-wing populists. Anecdotally, I posted a tweet (complete with multiple typos) sympathetic to the gilets jaunes, and of the 60+ likes it has garnered almost all of them are by conservative nationalist or openly fascist users. Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker's coverage of the Yellow Vests, wrote this warning that many leftists seem to agree with:

given how well organized and how alarmingly popular the far right has been in recent decades, it is surely the most likely to benefit from a social rupture: in a contest between the far right and far left that might come in Macron’s wake, anyone would bet on the Le Pens. For that reason, the gilets jaunes seem more likely to become the French face of Trumpism—or of Orbanism, or even of Putinism—than of a more tolerant future

One of the first good leftist critiques I came across was “Yellows Vests for Those Who See Red” (translated by Ediciones inéditos from the original Agitations text) which pointed out that any protest movement that includes cops, fascists, and employers could not be very threatening to the ruling classes. It went on to denounce the tax protests as “far from being a class struggle” and criticize the movement for not attacking production sites (I guess the transportation system, which almost all industry ultimately depends on, doesn’t count?)

A similar but expanded analysis of the inter-class nature of the movement can be found in this article published by the International Communist Current which claims that “The right and extreme right clearly recognise in the ‘gilets jaunes’ a movement which in no way puts the capitalist system in any danger.”

Acte IV of the protests took place last Saturday, December 8. The Reuters headline the night before read “Paris in lockdown as France braces for new anti-Macron riots” and notes that nearly 90,000 riot police had been deployed around France to quell riots, including 8,000 in Paris alone. The mood evoked by the tension reminded me of the Mischief Brew song about finding an old newspaper clipping reporting on the preparations to squash a May Day strike in the morning:

This gasoline has met its match.
“Any uprising will be smashed.”
The stirring guns and loaded tanks,
So who shall cast the first red flag?
On yellow paper, black type:
“Troops are ready to smash a general strike.”

— Paris Warlike on May Day Eve by Mischief Brew

During Acte IV the police, stretched to their limit, made 400 peremptory arrests before the demonstrations began, then more than 1,000 as they clashed with protesters. Quite a response for a movement “which poses no threat to the capitalist system.”

So the above criticisms, I think, have proved to be shortsighted (though things are still changing quickly). It is something of a trope that leftist organizations spend all their time preparing for proletariat revolt, and then are caught completely off-guard and disgusted by its impurity when it finally happens. It would be a shame to abandon the movement to the right-wing influences, but fortunately even early on many working-class French leftists actually participating in the events weren’t so pessimistic about the movement’s prospects. I found this quote in an article published by an anarchist group after Acte III of the protests (December 1):

The movement of yellow vests is a real popular revolt, with an obvious class dimension, but whose political colouring depends on local contexts. The worst is next to the best. That the fascist and nationalist leprosy infects several points of the mobilization and flowers in the words of some of the yellow vests is not surprising given the current political context. But to believe that the far right could monopolize a popular struggle of magnitude is an incredible admission of weakness.

As for me, when the people’s anger is directed overwhelmingly at the powerful and the exploiters, and when the people’s paving stones are directed overwhelmingly at the cops, it is easy to choose a side.

Selected readings

As I am writing this it is early Saturday morning in Paris. Whether a significant Acte V will materialize is yet to be seen. Things are changing quickly; it is difficult for people on the ground in Paris to keep up, much more so a non-Francophone thousands of miles away. I’ve not had time to read much, and new commentaries and translations keep appearing. Here are my favorite of the ones I’ve read so far.

Joshua Clover, The Roundabout Riots, Verso Blog (9 December 2018).

If you only read one, read this one. “In this article, Joshua Clover argues that the gilets jaunes are in fact a texbook example of a contemporary riot, and may be best seen as an early example of an approaching wave of climate riots.”

He also has another good short take: “Five Notes on the Yellow Vest Movement,” Popula (19 December 2018).

Paris/Maidan: Two Letters on the Uprising in France, The New Inquiry (7 December 2018).

The first letter from France is an astute summary of the situation:

Analyses abound. “It’s an interclass movement,” say the Marxists. “This movement has oppressors,” say others. “This movement has a penchant for authoritarianism and populism,” say the anarchists. “This movement is anti-ecological,” say the environmentalists. “This is a conservative tax revolt,” mostly everyone agrees. Yet whoever satisfies themselves with their political ideology is condemned to perish. …

The second letter recalls some lessons from the Ukranian Euromaidan uprising, urging anarchists and the left to not “curse everything and return to their homes, mumbling something about the unconscious masses” just because they spot a few fascists in the crowd.

Matias Maiello, “On Yellow Vests, Unions, and Intellectuals,” Left Voice (17 December 2018).

Uses Brazil’s 2013 uprising as an example of how the labour union’s fears of the far-right danger becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Translated from the original published on December 9th.

Left Voice continues to translate and publish commentary: http://leftvoice.org/Yellow-Vests

The Yellow Vest Movement in France: Between “Ecological” Neoliberalism and “Apolitical” Movements, CrimethInc (27 November 2018).

Anarchists, especially, are put in an awkward position by these sorts of populist uprisings which involve far-right elements. About the best we can do is mumble something about a three-way fight and hope the fascists don’t come out the better (very similar to the 2013 transit fare protests in Brazil or the Euromaidan demonstrations in Ukraine).

CrimethInc has done an admirable job of this with their analysis of the early protests:

What should anarchists do in a situation like this? We can’t side with the state against demonstrators who are already struggling to survive. Likewise, we can’t side with demonstrators against the natural environment. We have to establish an anti-nationalist position within anti-government protests and an anti-state position within ecological movements. The “yellow vest” movement provides an instructive opportunity for us to think about how to strategize in an era of three-sided conflicts that pit us against both nationalists and centrists.

[…]

From our perspective, there’s no doubt that their anger is legitimate. Most people who take part in this movement speak of the difficult living situations they have to deal with every day. It makes sense that they are saying that they have had enough; the gas issue is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. […]

So anger—and direct action—are legitimate. The question is whether the political vision and values that are driving this movement can lead to anything good.

The CrimethInc piece describes the gilets jaunes as inspiring, criticizes it for starting off from a non-radical position (“we should be asking why we are so dependent on cars and gasoline in the first place”), but comes to no fast conclusion as to whether the movement will lead to anything good.

They are continuing to publish commentary and reports: https://crimethinc.com/tags/yellow-vest

Will Wiles, “The Slippery Politics of the Gilets Jaunes’ Hi-Vis Jackets,” Frieze (12 December 2018).

On some of the symbolism of hi-vis workwear.

A Twitter thread with photos of good graffiti from the protests

Figure 1. The regime is only held together by the police.

Occupy the Farm Redux

2017-05-26T01:50:19Z

You’re really doin’ some bang-up policework
You ripped the whole damn garden out
You got the rats out of your corn
And let the vampires in your house
You got a bug for son and daughter
To always know the time and place
And it don’t seem all that crazy
Just the way the world is run today

— Mischief Brew
Bang-Up Policework

Five years ago I wrote about the eviction of Occupy the Farm from UC Berkeley land on the same day the Denver City Council passed the “urban camping ban” to further criminalize homelessness in Denver. If you look at the URL of that post, you’ll see that I had originally titled it “A Depressing Monday.”

Back in 2012 I thought the eviction was the end of Occupy the Farm and never heard anything else about it until I came across a 2014 documentary about the project earlier this month. It turns out I gave up too early and Occupy the Farm has been one of the most successful of the camps inspired by Occupy Wall Street: the activists broke back onto the land in May 2013 to re-establish the farm. Despite two more raids by police, they refused the university’s comically bureaucratic attempts at co-optation, successfully got Whole Foods to back out of their development plans, and finally the university capitulated and has committed to preserving a plot of land including a little over an acre which has been turned into the UC Gill Tract Community Farm.

One of the more novel tactics the university used was to file a lawsuit against individual activists (which it later dropped). It’s silly, but much preferable to the Reagan approach of simply shooting activists with shotguns (I’m surprised the documentary didn’t point out the parallels between Occupy the Farm and the 1969 occupation of People’s Park).

Berkeleyside reported on the progress of the farm in the summer of 2005:

The farm aims to be a source of organic produce for anyone who lacks access in the East Bay. Volunteers have harvested 17,000 pounds of produce since June 2014. Today, about 30 different types of crops grow on just over one acre of land — everything from dry-farmed tomatoes and leeks to pineapple ground cherries, which are tomatillos that taste just like, well, pineapple.

…

The farm has seen seven field trips from nearby schools and has hosted interns and over 40 different workshops. Volunteers also supply food to the Berkeley Food Pantry, senior housing communities including Harriet Tubman Terrace and the Sojourner Truth Manor, and other community groups. (“UC Gill Tract Farm blooms amidst controversy” by Kathleen Costanza)

After Whole Foods backed out, the university did make a deal with Sprouts which protesters were unsuccessful in challenging (I believe the store opened for business this month). In an interesting contradiction which seems to have escaped the film-maker’s notice, the documentary begins by lamenting the lack of grocery stores in some neighborhoods (in order to make the case for urban farming) while many of the Occupy the Farm activists ended up spending much of their time protesting the construction of grocery stores.

The documentary is called “Occupy The Farm”. I paid $0.99 to watch it on Amazon. Review in California Magazine: “Getting a Front Row Seat at Occupy the Farm: The Movie”

On the road to May Day: A non-report-back from Denver 2017

2017-05-11T19:09:59Z

Figure 1. “Diogenes Asking for Alms” by Jean-Bernard Restout (1767). Here Diogenes is begging from a statue, which he did to practice being rejected.

A spectrum of beggars

Being asked why people give to beggars but not to philosophers, Diogenes said, “Because they think they may one day be lame or blind, but never expect that they will turn to philosophy.”

Every other day of the year I’m dismissive toward churches, parties, unions, and holy days; but on May 1st, I’m somehow always hopeful that a large number of radicals will turn out and cause trouble. It’s been a few years since I’ve written a post complaining about the tameness of May Day in Denver. That’s because I realized that I’m too shy to contribute to or get much out of protests and stopped attending them. This year, however, with good weather, the drama around Trump, and the centennial of the 1917 revolutions, I thought the demonstrations could be big. I searched online and saw that the Democratic Socialists of America and some other groups planned a “May Day Against Trumpism” at the capitol building. Wanting to not miss out, I took the bus to the city.

Between Union Station and Denver’s capitol building is a mile of pedestrian shopping called 16th Street Mall. Recounting one’s walk down 16th Street Mall is often to sketch a continuum-forming typology of beggars:

Figure 2. A print-quality diagram depicting the perfectly sensible multi-dimensional typology of begging. I’m not at all embarrassed of the concept or drawing. The bus icon is by Naomi Atkinson; the capitol icon is by Loren Klein (CC-BY-3.0). The lines were drawn by me: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Click image for SVG version.

Almost as soon as I stepped outside of the bus station a woman approached me and asked if I had “a dollar or something to help with food.” I remembered that I had grabbed some extra change with my bus fare and handed her the two dimes. She cheerfully assured me that every little bit helps. This is the unpretentious beggar: she offers nothing in exchange for taking money except to live and beg another day. Every other beggar I’d meet on my way to the capitol would present their case as an exchange; they’d tell me that either I or an even more helpless third party somewhere would benefit from my donation.

A girl with a clipboard standing at the nearby intersection who witnessed my twenty-cent donation caught my eyes and asked, “Do you want to save a child with me today?” From what I gathered before the crossing light changed, the plan was for her to get paid to solicit donations for some sponsor-a-child charity scheme and for me to give her my money. I couldn’t even think of a sensible response to that offer of teamwork and just awkwardly shook my head before crossing the street. Later down the mall I met some more clipboard beggars, and I did much better. One girl got my attention with a friendly greeting and then explained that with Trump in office it is very important that I give to the ACLU. I told her I didn’t have any money. She was understanding and told me that I could donate online whenever I do have money.

A man begging on behalf of Save The Children, an organization currently helping victims of the Syrian civil war, asked if he could talk to me about their work. I told him I don’t have any money, and he politely asked if he could give me his spiel anyway. So I listened. When he got back to asking for a donation I wished him luck and walked on. It turns out that while he’s trying to extract money from unemployed anarchists on the mall, the President and CEO of Save the Children, Carolyn Miles (whose background is in marketing, specifically in selling American Express cards to college students), is paid $455,000 per year.

Further down the mall I looked down and walked fast to avoid interacting with a pair of clipboard-holders wearing Greenpeace shirts.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. When I crossed to the other side of 16th Street, on the first block of the mall, there was a man playing the flute along to some kind of electronic jazz music playing from a loudspeaker while also talking to passers-by trying to get them to dance. It was a tough crowd, but he was a skilled performer and there were several dollars in the wooden box on the ground in front of him.

Unlike most beggars, buskers are generally not only tolerated but desired by downtown business improvement districts because they provide some cultural authenticity which makes shopping a less sterile experience. People often give to buskers because they genuinely enjoyed the performance rather than out of pity, in which cases street performing is a commercial art rather than begging proper. While I’ve not witnessed them in Denver, other cases in which unsolicited services are pre-rendered with the expectation of payment, such as squeegee beggars who clean windshields at stoplights for donations, probably rarely make that transition (and so precede busking in the spectrum).

The claim that donations are actually payment for a service is a rhetorical game Diogenes played when he said people should pay him “not for alms, but for repayment of his due” (presumably for being such a great philosopher). And like some guilt-tripping clipboard beggars, he also tried leaning on potential donors' sense of fairness and morality to reason them into giving to him: “If you have already given to anyone else, give to me also; if not, begin with me.”

Jesus, the founder of the other ancient tradition of begging which has been gnawing the foundations of Western civilization for over 2,000 years, also gave some rather cynical advice on how to handle beggars. Included in his Sermon on the Mount are three of his most characteristic pronouncements. The first, “Do not resist an evildoer,” is followed by three examples of enduring more abuse than one’s day-to-day abusers expect (if someone slaps your face, turn turn the other cheek; if someone sues you for the literal shirt off your back, give them your cloak too; if you are conscripted to walk a mile, walk two miles). The third is “Love your enemies,” after which Jesus points out that even tax collectors — the very agents of exploitation — are nice to their friends, so that should be, like, the absolute minimum standard of behavior.

Perhaps less famous (though not less vexing) than those two paradoxical sayings is found right between them: “Give to everyone who begs from you.”

Jesus’s first followers were propertyless peasants who had left even their homes, were used to putting up with abuse at the hands of their social betters, to going without sufficient clothing, to walking more than even soldiers, were more often beggars than givers, and who nevertheless treated everybody well. Whatever the deeper and more general applications of these sayings, then, on their surface they not only presented the lifestyle of the early Christians (that which potential followers would be expected to adopt), they also seem to be lightheartedly self-serving in the same style of the Cynics who taught that it was virtuous to give to homeless philosophers.

The co-optation of Christianity by the rich and powerful not long after Jesus was executed imbued these sayings with even greater difficulty for their future audiences, especially “give to everyone who begs from you” which cannot be so easily philosophized away as a paradox. As an example, consider the case of a 19th-century Russian aristocrat named Leo Tolstoy who after a legendary career as a novelist attempted to take the sayings of Jesus seriously. His struggles with “do not resist an evildoer” produced several works which had profound influences on social justice movements around the world and are still read by pacifists and anarchists today. But it wasn’t until he was quite old that he finally got the courage (if sneaking away from one’s wife in the middle of the night counts as courageous) to leave all of his possessions by setting out on train with nothing but the clothes of a standard Russian peasant. He developed pneumonia and died within days of leaving home.

The pretensions of the cynical beggar are ironic in that the audience is aware of the rhetorical game, but like in the case of the street performer, it is the decision of those who give as to whether they are giving out of pity or gratitude. Beyond that, the type of beggar represented by the Cynic and the Christian are honest both in the sense that they present neither sob stories nor pretended friendliness, but even more so in that they invite their listeners to throw off their own pretensions about the society they are living in and reproducing. That is, to the Cynic and the Christian, giving to beggars is not in tension with more systematic solutions to poverty, it is the systematic solution to poverty. The clipboard-holding fundraiser, in contrast, who has perfected the sob story, the salesman-like friendliness, and who claims salvation is found in non-profit organizations, is perhaps the paragon of the dishonest beggar.

I didn’t have occasion to mention it, because I have thankfully never been a witness or victim to a robbery (not that such crimes are unknown on the 16th Street Mall), but robbers also make no claim to be helping their victims and should logically precede the unpretentious beggar in our spectrum. While of course theft and robbery, being characterized by their involuntary demands, are not begging properly, even muggers sometimes couch their activity in the language of a market exchange (‘your money for your life’).

Julian, the fourth-century Roman emperor (a nephew of Constantine) who tried to peacefully revert the empire from Christianity back to Paganism, was annoyed with the openly atheist and crude Cynics of his day. He wanted all Cynics to be as pious and educated as he imagined Diogenes and Crates were, and argued that most Cynics were even worse than bandits and pirates who were at least decent enough to be ashamed of their lifestyle and live in their faraway hideouts instead of preaching at people in the streets. He also referred to Cynics as “monks,” intending the association with Christians to be an insult (Christians were only one or three gods away from being atheists themselves).

At many of the intersections along the mall I saw newspaper salesmen — often older men with all of their possessions in bags on the ground at their feet — selling the Denver VOICE for a suggested $2 per copy. Originally founded 20 years ago as “a grassroots newspaper created by homeless people for homeless people,” the VOICE is now written for a general audience and sold by homeless vendors (who buy the papers for $0.50 each) as a way for them to earn some income. (The Denver VOICE is independent, but its operating model is influenced by similar street newspaper vending networks which operate in cities around the world.)

These charity vendors, whose sales depend at least as much on pity as on satisfying the wants of their customers, are located in the middle of the murky space where begging becomes selling (somewhere to the retail side of the children in third-world cities who sell trinkets to Western tourists).

Of course the entire mall is lined by actual retail shops and beggardly advertisements. Salespersons and advertisers (and the business owners they work for) likely imagine they are much further along the spectrum of begging than they actually are.

Downtown business associations and city councils will often commission artwork to help beautify shopping areas and, as in the case of buskers, will happily tolerate some guerrilla murals which provide a degree of authenticity to the shopping environment. But for the most part any art or graphic design which might distract from the commercial purposes of the property is forbidden. In the words of the street artist Banksy, “The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back.”

Banksy’s observation echoes one by GK Chesterton a hundred years earlier that “It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money”:

A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.

Shop and restaurant owners on the 16th Street Mall have been known to be hostile to the more needy beggars operating on their turf and have enlisted the police to carry out revanchist actions against the most vulnerable. In 2012, legislation criminalizing the act of sleeping outside with shelter (defined as “any tent, tarpaulin, lean-to, sleeping bag, bedroll, blankets, or any form of cover or protection from the elements other than clothing”) was passed on behalf of downtown business owners. Under the authority of that code, police have conducted winter raids on homeless camps to confiscate blankets. Recently three individuals accused of camping with shelter were tried by jury, convicted, and sentenced to several days of forced labour.

The City of Denver in collaboration with downtown business owners has installed mechanical panhandlers — modified parking meters — which are meant to compete with live beggars. The city has promised the money collected by the machines will go toward “job training, meals and permanent housing options that help get people back on their feet,” but it has been caught spending it instead to help fund the police sweeps of homeless camps.

The mall ends where 16th Street dead-ends into Broadway. To the north is the financial heart of Denver’s business center. On 16th Street itself are the two Denver World Trade Center buildings and Republic Plaza (the tallest building in Denver); scattered beyond those are more high-rise office buildings and skyscrapers. These buildings exhibit almost none of the colorful and chaotic elements of the shopping mall and are instead dark, sleek, and inauspicious.

The craft of capital allocation and investment, which is practiced in many of these buildings, does not depend on demanding, begging, or offering so much as on staking ownership and simply taking interest. Like the robber on one end of our spectrum, we have financial capitalism on the other: the bandit subsumed. The full spectrum of begging plays out between these dialectical bookends of the modern capitalist economy, as it does everyday between Union Station and Broadway.

Walking a block south on Broadway brought me to the state capitol building. I could see maybe 100 demonstrators nestled up on the steps waving red and black flags. A large banner facing the street read “No War But Class War,” and another further back read “Workers & Oppressed People of the World Unite!” There were no police or pro-Trump counter-protestors in sight.

The prospect of joining them seemed both socially overwhelming and boring. Like some sort of party. So I continued walking down Broadway and spent my afternoon in the Denver Public Library. It was a good May Day.

Other people’s May Day 2017

Of course, some people actually followed through on their plans to attend a May Day demonstration. The local Fox News affiliate was kind enough to both get the word out about various May Day protests in Denver as well as to follow up with a short video and a couple of pictures from the event at the capitol: “May Day events taking place in Denver” (Fox31, 1 May 2017). More photos can be found on the Facebook event page.

A few cities around the world saw major protests, with the riot in Paris getting the most headlines because protesters responded to police tear gas with spectacular petrol bombs. Hundreds of protesters and six cops were injured during the clashes.

In the United States the most unusual thing about May Day this year was the presence of Trump-inspired right-wing counter-protesters who turned up in several cities. Seattle was unusually quiet though there was a minor confrontation with participants of a “Stand Against Communism” rally.

The most rowdy demonstrations were in Portland and Olympia. In Portland a minor riot broke out after a few protesters threw full cans of Pepsi at riot police who responded by charging into the mostly peaceful crowd of marchers. The bloc’d up [mostly-anarchist, no doubt] protesters who instigated the police response have been criticized for endangering the rest of the march.

There was also a small riot in Olympia where protesters threw rocks at police (and some counter-protesters threw rocks at marching demonstrators). In one unfortunate and embarrassing instance, a protester tried to pepper spray some taunting counter-protesters and accidentally sprayed passers-by including a dog. Most cops are not even that irresponsible with chemical weapons.

The Red Guards Austin, a Maoist group which has gained some notoriety in recent months due to their open-carry demonstrations, tried to march in Austin, but they were surround by an alarming number of reactionary counter protesters. Apparently racists and anti-communists of the InfoWars variety are numerous in the Austin area (I didn’t realize until now that Alex Jones lives in Austin and hosts his show there). Some Red Guards members were carrying rifles, and so were a few of the right-wingers. In their public self-criticism which they posted to their weblog, the Red Guards described this scary moment:

Early on in the march a fascist named William Fears physically assaulted one of the comrades who was guiding chants and for this Fears came very close to forcing our units to use lethal force. Those in attendance could see fear in his eyes as the Partisan unit moved into the ready position prepared to chamber a round.

My impression is that the Austin PD did a good job keeping the groups apart and possibly from literally killing each other. The independent journalist Kit O’Connell was present and wrote a good postmortem of the event: “Unpacking The Fascist Rampage On May Day In Austin: What Happened, What Went Wrong.” I could not find a single report from a main stream news outfit.

Sources of quotations

The sayings of Diogenes quoted above can be found in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book VI. Those of Jesus are recorded in Matthew 5:38-48. Julian’s thoughts on Cynics are preserved in his seventh Oration: “To the Cynic Heracleios.” The Banksy quote is from his introduction to Wall and Piece. GK Chesterton’s opinion on advertisements can be found in his 1920 book The New Jerusalem.

No War But The Class Apocalypse!: Further Reflections on Rioting

2014-12-16T18:56:38Z

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions.

— Leo Tolstoy
"On Anarchy"

The English word apocalypse is derived from a Greek word (ἀποκαλύπτω) meaning to “uncover” as in a disclosure of knowledge: a revelation. In my commentary on the social unrest in Ferguson, MO, (“On Camels, Liberal Myths, and Ferguson”) I suggested that the activities of riots were apocalyptic in their ability to shatter (like a storefront window) the illusion of legitimacy with which authority masks itself. I’d like to explore the limits of a few of those ideas including a clarification on the meaning of “false consciousness,” the question of pacifism, and a generalization of the virtues of riots to disruptive peace.

You Sheeple Are Workers and You Don’t Even Know It!

First, the clarification. In my commentary “On Camels…” I used a term originally introduced by Frederick Engels, “false consciousness,” which comes with some historical baggage. It has sometimes been used to suggest that workers in capitalist countries don’t know what their own self-interests are (or what their “true” interests are), a usage which completely displaces subjectivity with a simple class analysis. Such a usage of the term is especially problematic, since in wealthy capitalist countries (like America) most workers share in the plunder of global exploitation, their complicity providing them with social stability, high real wages, and all the goods and comforts capitalism has to offer. Sustaining capitalism for as long as possible is in the material interest of a great portion of American workers.

But that is not my intended usage. By “false consciousness” I mean only the beliefs that capitalism (or any dominant form of exploitation) is “natural,” or that it is the only or most practical and/or ethical way to feed the world.

Riots and Non-Resistance to Evil by Force

When “peace and order” are the watchwords of the ruling classes, any ‘peaceful protest’ is seen merely as a natural part of a system that “works” and so is stripped of much of its revelatory power. An insistence on “nonviolence” tends to reinforce the illusion that the existing organization of society is natural or peaceful while all criticism becomes aimed at the comparatively microscopic transgressions such as disobeying a police officer or looting.

But what about more thoroughgoing pacifist doctrines such as the “non-resistance to evil by force” as popularized in recent times by the likes of Leo Tolstoy? Is such a principle compatible with rioting? If not, does it provide a better alternative than the riot? I am personally undecided, but I do not, at least, think a strong Tolstoyan case can be made against rioting.

Even granting its correctness, there are two important aspects of Tolstoy’s non-resistance to keep in mind when considering it in the context of revolt against oppression. The first is that non-resistance is an invective against the use of force by the state (and against the very existence of the state). The entire hope upon which the principle of non-resistance rests is that it will result in a world in which there are no police or soldiers or property owners for them to protect. To invoke non-resistance in defense of police enforcing the law to keep the poor in their place is entirely self-defeating.

Secondly, unlike the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ghandi, Tolstoy’s non-resistance is not posited as a political tactic; and unlike my defense of riots, it is not presented as an epistemological trick or a way to reveal truth. It is instead an individual’s lifestyle choice and a duty aimed at creating a peaceful society now, in whatever degree possible, regardless of the ongoing existence of societies structured by police and soldiers. But the choice to embrace non-resistance to evil is unlikely to be made until the existing, violent structure of society is recognized.

In the final chapter of The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy describes the conditions of Czarist Russia to illustrate the violence of that system. In particular he describes the plight of peasants who resisted enclosure and other abuses by landlords (through riots and otherwise) and the soldiers who unquestioningly carried out the execution and torture of those rebel peasants.

An aspect of what I call “false consciousness” is described by Tolstoy in that chapter as “that constant, stubborn tendency of men to increase their well-being, which guides the men of our time, to become convinced that the prerogatives of the rich over the poor could not and cannot be maintained in any other way.” He describes the emergence from such false consciousness in rather mystical terms (“It is not necessary for anything new to enter into the consciousness of men, but only for the mist to disappear, which conceals from men the true meaning of some acts of violence”), but if the riots and acts of rebellion by the peasants didn’t open Tolstoy’s eyes, they are at least the best images he found with which to communicate his own awareness of the nature of feudal Russia.

What if the Russian peasants were Tolstoyan in their actions and had accepted their lot and submitted to their hunger and subjection without causing their governors any grief? Tolstoy would have been left without illustration to reveal the meaning of violence. The very insight which makes Tolstoy’s non-resistance possible itself depends on subordinate groups' assertion of their own dignity — which is almost never a peaceful affair.

The Russian peasants' belligerence allowed Tolstoy to give us a glimpse through the mist, and anticipating Howard Zinn, he shows us that which the dominant hypocrisy always strives to hide: “We need, however, only think of history, not the history of the successes of various dynasties of rulers, but real history, the history of the oppression of the majority by a small number of men, to see that the bases of all the prerogatives of the rich over the poor have originated from nothing but switches, prisons, hard labor, murders.”

The Limits of Riots as Revelatory Events

I restricted my comments on Ferguson to the context of a liberal republic, and specifically to the United States of America. That context represents a very thin slice along the range of human experience. Conditions in which violence is the status quo — places characterized by warfare — are sustained by very different myths than the “law and order” rhetoric of liberalism.

The myths which sustain war are often built on nationalism including ethnic pride, religious pride, and other contrived perversions of camaraderie. And some riots devolve into (or never rise beyond) little wars in which subordinate groups, instead of uniting against their oppressors, turn on each other. Such riots and tribal wars, rather than revealing the hypocrisy of the dominant ideology, work to further obscure class consciousness in the shroud of ethnic antagonism.^[1]

If some riots have the power to expose the myths of stable modes of production, like the capital of liberalism, in what way can the myths sustaining unstable societies be revealed? How can a disruption like war be disrupted? One striking example can be found almost exactly 100 years ago during the Christmas Truce of 1914 in which 10,000 British and German soldiers decided, without permission, to stop killing each other and to instead leave their trenches, socialize, sing carols, and play football with each other in no-man’s land.

It was the general spirit of noncooperation which existed among many soldiers during WWI that made the Christmas Truce and other impromptu truces possible. Riots and truces have similar apocalyptic properties, and they suggest a general strategy for rebellion: when the authorities want peace and order, give them chaos; when they want war, give them peace.

1. For an explanation of how wage labour directly causes such antagonism, see Edna Bonacich’s “A theory of ethnic antagonism: The split labor market,” American sociological review (1972): 547-559.

On Camels, Liberal Myths, and Ferguson

2014-12-07T13:41:11Z

“In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.”

— Guy Debord
The Society of the Spectacle

Background: The Killing of Michael Brown

As far as I know, none of the following facts are disputed. On August 9, 2014, Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson City Police Department confronted Michael Brown, 18, and his acquaintance^[1] Dorian Johnson, 22, from his vehicle because they were walking in the middle of a residential street. The officer ordered them to move to the sidewalk. Instead of simply complying, Brown argued with the officer through the window of the police SUV. A scuffle ensued, Brown, who was unarmed, hit Wilson in the face with his hand, and according to Wilson’s testimony, made a grab for the officer’s firearm. In response, Wilson fired 2 shots at Brown who ran down the street for about 150 feet before turning around to face the officer (some witnesses reported he had turned around in surrender). Meanwhile Wilson had exited his vehicle and pursued on foot, firing at least 10 more times. Less than 90 seconds after initially contacting the jaywalker, Wilson had hit Brown with at least 6 bullets, including a fatal shot to his head.^[2]

Johnson later explained that Brown was in the midst of a some sort of mystical crises on the day he died. He had an earlier preminition that his stepmother and grandmother would be delivered from their illnesses through his prayer, and was experiencing what seemed like supernatural phenomena including that he was being protected from cars as he walked in the street. This state of mind may help explain both why Brown was walking in the middle of road and why he made the courageous but suicidal decision to turn and face the officer who was firing at him.^[3]

A grand jury was convened after the shooting, and it found the evidence to be insufficient to provide probable cause for bringing criminal charges against officer Wilson. He was never arrested in connection with the killing.

Both the shooting and the grand jury decision have been met with significant social unrest in Ferguson and in cities around the country including protest marches, riots, looting, and destruction of retail storefront property.

The sentiment behind some of the protesters' demands for “justice for Mike Brown” and the bewildered response of spectating [white] Americans trying to make sense of why the black residents of Ferguson (sometimes just “thugs”) would destroy “their own” neighborhoods both reveal something of the mystified nature of capitalism and the myths which sustain it.

Myths the Size of Camels

Frederich Engels used the term ‘false consciousness’ to describe beliefs about the world which obfuscate its actual workings and mislead people into accepting the current social structures as “natural” or even inevitable. And it was Karl Marx, an often unemployed theorist living under industrial capitalism, who taught us the importance of the economic basis in understanding the nature, ends, and ideologies of the dominate political structures in all times and places. But it was Jesus of Nazareth, a propertyless Jewish peasant subsisting under imperial Rome, who taught us how to see and see through the moral judgments which flow from such false consciousness, a morality which serves to protect and create the exploiting classes.

Among the sayings of Jesus which have been preserved, there are a handful of colorful and memorable quips employing exaggerated contrasts to illustrate the hypocritical judgments made by the dominant political and religious ideologies and leaders of his time. One of the most famous is his rhetorical question to those who fixate on the speck of sawdust in their brother’s eye, but don’t even notice the log sticking out of their own eye.^[4] Another is, “You blind leaders! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!”^[5]

What Jesus' sayings help to reveal, although it is counterintuitive, is that the most successful and stubborn ideas which make up a false consciousness do not operate on subtle misconceptions or minor deceptions. They are always complete reversals resulting in total hypocrisies.

Jesus' cynicism can be applied generally to see how the hypocrisy is borne out today (and a few specific examples of such reversals from Ferguson will be demonstrated in the next sections). Every stable mode of production has its own obfuscating myths which are accepted by a sufficient number of both the exploiting and exploited classes to maintain widespread complacency. And so in liberalism we can expect to find those myths which hide the horrors of capitalism from the citizens of republics:

Private Property, a ruthless process and legal institution which deprives millions of property, requiring armies of police and soldiers to maintain, is seen as a provider of prosperity and stability. The Rule of Law, which so impartially allows the rich and the starving poor to depend on the purchase of commodities for survival, is seen as an egalitarian force. Above all Progressivism — by which the current social organization is seen to be fundamentally good and always improving through the democratic mechanisms of elections, petition, and scientific enlightenment — condemns as criminal any attempt by the oppressed to assert their dignity or make actual improvements to their conditions.

‘Justice for Mike Brown’

If the pig who shot Mike Brown ever sees the courtroom
You’ll have mostly the looters to thank for it

— Pat The Bunny
"I Was A Teenage Anarchist"

Returning to the death of Michael Brown: arming oneself then confronting, fighting with, pursuing, and finally shooting to death an unarmed young man is behavior which should require significant extenuating circumstances to excuse. Even if Wilson were not a police officer, his actions would likely warrant a criminal trial to determine the facts more fully. But Wilson is a police officer who has been entrusted by the public (whom he is ostensibly protecting) with weapons, training, and legal authority. If anything, while acknowledging his work will tend to place him into conflicts, he should be held to a higher standard of behavior and legal culpability than an ordinary citizen in handling those confrontations. Instead, in accordance with the law, he has been granted extra leniency and the case against him will not even be examined in open court.

Given all of that, and not even considering pre-existing systemic injustices or the patterns of police abuse, it is plain why there is such widespread belief that an injustice was committed against Michael Brown and the Ferguson community. ‘Justice for Mike Brown’ has become a slogan for protests, and is taken as a demand by journalists looking to provide a motive for protesters. But what would such ‘justice’ look like? All too often the slogan is simply a demand that Darren Wilson be more fully subjected to the same criminal justice system which produced him. In such cases it is actually a demand of ‘justice for Darren Wilson’.

It’s a demand that reveals two divergent but both conservative reactions. The first, the ‘peaceful protesters,’ believe the justice system provides its own adequate channels of reform and view protest, insofar as it is legal or at least peaceful, as legitimate democratic petition of the government. The second, sharing the logic of a lynch mob, believes itself to be an extralegal corrective to a justice system gone so far astray that its own means of reform are no longer effective. Both accept at face value the necessity of the justice system as it promises to function.

On one of the riotous nights following the grand jury decision, CNN described a crowd of protesters who overturned and burned a police cruiser and then chanted across the street toward the lines of riot police and national guardsmen, “We are not your enemy. We just want justice.”^[6] The demand for justice, referring to criminal justice, shows how fully even some of the vandalizing protesters in Ferguson have internalized the liberal myths which legitimate capitalism and its political superstructures. Except to the grieving friends and family of Michael Brown who can’t be blamed for seeking whatever peace and closure they can find from a legal system which purports to provide it, the question of justice in the case of Darren Wilson is a symptom, a speck of dust, a gnat. Yet the Ferguson community leaders and many protesters strain at him while swallowing the murderous political system they believe can bring them justice.

Vandalism, even in the cause of liberalism, is clearly seen as a threat to the authorities and the image of control they’d like to maintain (hence the frenzied calls for peace among political leaders at all levels). But the split between the strictly peaceful and the extra-legal protesters also provides an opportunity to control the scope of debate during times of social unrest. For example, note what the highest ranking office of liberalism in the world has to say about rioting. During the 1992 LA Riots, President Bush acknowledged that while Americans have reason to be frustrated with the law, they should not actually unleash those frustrations on the legal system itself:

“In this highly controversial court case, a verdict was handed down by a California jury. To Americans of all races who were shocked by the verdict, let me say this: You must understand that our system of justice provides for the peaceful, orderly means of addressing this frustration. We must respect the process of law whether or not we agree with the outcome. There’s a difference between frustration with the law and direct assaults upon our legal system.” ^[7]

— George Bush

Similarly, president Obama in his address to the nation after the Ferguson grand jury decision pleaded for frustrations to be channeled “constructively”:

“First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law. And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make. […] But what is also true is that there are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. […] What we need to do is to understand them and figure out how do we make more progress. […] That won’t be done by throwing bottles. That won’t be done by smashing car windows. […] So, to those in Ferguson, there are ways of channeling your concerns constructively and there are ways of channeling your concerns destructively.”^[8]

— Barack Obama

Riots provide several benefits for the working class at the expense of the owning class. As such, there is an ideological benefit in dissuading those who can be persuaded by liberalism from rioting. The liberal kit outlined by Obama — foundation on a Rule of Law, Progress, the sanctity of Property, and proper Democratic channels — is so ingrained in the minds of Americans that such appeals may work at an almost instinctive level. But even if they are ineffective in that, appeals to the law serve at least two important roles in maintaining order:

By constantly making a distinction between lawful and non-lawful protest, the debate becomes centered on the morality and efficacy of extralegal reform. This has the effect of pushing radical change to the periphery, and completely out of view of most protesters and spectators.
By creating a sense of urgency in maintaining peaceful protests, politicians can induce protesters to police each other.

A darker theoretical speculation can be drawn about the role of murderous policing itself, including the double-standard seen in the indictment process. By deviating so obviously from the promise of justice the system purports, prosecutors and police have succeeded in prompting people to take to the streets in support of the criminal justice system.

Why Are They Looting Their Own Neighborhoods?

Meanwhile, much of the American populace suffers from a similar but different aspect of the liberal mystification. They read the reports of looting and see the pictures on TV of shops on fire, and they just can’t seem to figure out why those black people would destroy “their own” neighborhoods. As if the shopping centers in any American neighborhood, much less a black neighborhood, are collectively-owned cooperatives or in any way belong to the community rather than to petite bourgeois owners.

These Americans are so ensconced in liberal mythology that they are utterly unable to make sense of the world that confronts them on their cable news programs every night. It seems perfectly natural to think of people — especially the dark skinned and uneducated — as automatons who should spend their lives working and obeying (or begging and obeying), but any disruption of peace and order is a startling transgression. ‘Peace and order’ is paramount; it implies the ability to peaceably and orderly employ, tax, fine, and blame the poor… in Ferguson and everywhere.

As it is with gnats and camels, so it is with looting and capital. Businesses have stolen more from the working class — and most extensively from the black working class — than any practical amount of looting could ever recover. Yet the political leaders, news journalists, and the average American worker will strain all of their moral indignation at the tiny acts of re-appropriation like when a looter makes off with food or a television, but will swallow without question the entire impoverishing, alienating system of wage work which leaves so many with so little.

The wealth of the United States of America, from a British colony to an imperialist superpower, is the result of over four centuries of indentured servitude, chattel slavery, genocide, debt peonage, subjugation of women, plundering wars, and a system of wage labour which has no end in sight, all legally sanctioned and enforced by the established police forces. And what Americans cannot understand, the thing that is beyond acceptance, is when a liquor store is looted.

The Virtue of Rioting

Of course not all events that occur during times of rebellion are necessarily good. There is nothing useful or dignifying in opportunistic violence against individuals or theft of personal property committed under cover of social unrest, and such acts are properly crimes. It is also important to recognize that spontaneous uprisings like Ferguson are not organized revolutions in which targets are prioritized, goods are seized and distributed according to need, and capital is taken over to be run collectively — or whatever revolution might look like.

As much as some of us may wish to see such activity, and while some spontaneous rebellions have historically lead to more directed revolutionary efforts, it is not even possible without more preparations than currently exist. The national guard in Missouri is happy to guard only the highest value centers of capital during a couple of nights of light looting of consumer goods. But if any protesters had attempted to actually take control of and operate their own workplaces, it would have been SWAT raids, live rounds, and whatever carnage was deemed necessary to return property to its lawfully exploiting owners.

But why loot and riot at all? Earlier in this essay I claimed that riots provide benefits to the working class. What are they? Most obvious is the material benefits inherent in the act of looting. In addition to material gain, looting brings a flavour of what a post-capitalist economy will feel like. On every other day of their life, a looter’s needs rule over them in the form of money and commodities. For a few brief days during a riot, commodities are subordinated to the form of mere goods which satisfy needs.

Secondly, riots win political concessions. They signal to the ruling class that it is squeezing a tad tightly and needs to let up in order to keep its grip. The unrest in Ferguson has directly prompted the federal government to begin investigating the Ferguson Police Department for possible civil rights abuses,^[9] and President Obama has asked congress for $75 million to fund 50,000 body cameras to help reduce murder and other abuse by America’s police officers.^[10] Other reforms may follow, none of which would have happened if protesters in Ferguson and elsewhere had not forced the issue.

But most importantly, riots and the reactions to riots reveal the hypocrisy Jesus saw so clearly. The public judgment of rioters lays bare the false morality of the dominate ideology. Covert domination — including economic exploitation and racism — can be swallowed and transmitted to new generations without being noticed. But overt domination is noticed and generates its own resistance. It is when domination is exposed and individuals are freed of their false consciousness that Jesus' “kingdom of heaven,” the Wobblies' “new world in the shell of the old,” and the Marxist’s “whithering away” of classes is possible. There are Christians who don’t understand a word of what Jesus said, but who nevertheless believe with all of their strength that his words have the power to save their souls. I don’t think they are wrong.

May Day 2014

2014-05-11T03:05:23Z

“Space is social”

— Henri Lefebvre

I’m too shy for this social activism stuff. But for the third year in a row I went to Denver on May Day to find out what the local anti-capitalist folks were up to. On my first May Day, 2012, I was in Denver anyway because my trial the previous day went long and I had to be in court on the morning of May 1st to find out from the jury whether I was guilty or not. That year, riding the momentum of Occupy Wall Street, there were hundreds of people out in the park all day. Various unions had organized speakers, some anarchists were hosting a really (really) free market, I saw pro-immigration chalk art advertising some Maoist website. Everyone was there! Some friendly transient kids even managed to outmaneuver my reluctance and included me in their conversation. When it got dark we slept out on the 16th Street Mall to protest the then-pending (now in force) urban camping ban.

Last year on May Day by the time I caught a bus to Denver it was snowing. I walked all over downtown (and then some) for hours and never found any May Day demonstrators. But the walk itself was lovely, the snowfall being unusually still and the flakes large. By the time I gave up and went back to the bus station, there was 5" of snow on the ground.

This year it was sunny, and I found the demonstration immediately: several dozen people holding banners and red flags at the bottom of the steps leading up to the capitol building. May Day this year happened to fall on the first Thursday of May, the National Day of Prayer.^[1] While the socialists were waving their red flags near the street at the bottom of the steps, about the same number of Christians were waving flags, singing, and praying at the top of the stairs. I don’t know which group was exhibiting the more wishful of thinking.

A bunch of commies showed up for the National Day of Prayer (photo by Janet Matzen)

I was a little disappointed with the small number of people who turned out. In a park a couple of blocks away from the demonstration I had walked past people doing some sort of group exercise. There were more people there, stretching in a park in the middle of a Thursday, than the entire gamut of working class and anti-capitalist groups in Denver could get to show up for an international labour day. At one point in the afternoon an elementary school class walked through our demonstration as part of a field trip to the state capitol. I think there were more children in that class learning the name of the state bird than there were demonstrators.

But a small demonstration can be a good thing, offering opportunities for more intimate conversation and an exchange of ideas which is not possible during massive demonstrations. The topics represented by the banners and short speeches being made throughout the day included refusal of work, the criminalization of homelessness, anarchism, and the police (who were gathered across the street and around the corner — at times there was probably a police officer surveilling us or ready for action for every two protesters in attendance). In other words, these were people who were interested in the same things I’m interested in — yet I managed to keep to myself for most of the day, feeling increasingly disconnected and depressed.

It is geography that fails me in my shyness. When I arrive at a place, and I do all the time, I don’t ask, “What is this place and how was it produced?” I need instead a normative geography. I’m constantly finding myself at places, and when I do I want to know, “What should I do here?” But I don’t know. I never know what to do when I get somewhere.

At demonstrations like the one on May Day I just hold to a vague hope that my presence alone will add to the body count and thereby increase the effectiveness of any worthwhile message. “Look, they’ve got flags, megaphones, and a guy sitting on the grass. Maybe capitalism is bad after all!” I’ve brought signs to protests before; those are good because they allow you to ineffectively communicate without even speaking. This year I brought some pamphlets I made just in case opportunities arose to hand them out. No such opportunities did arise.

Another aspect of the demonstration which left me feeling a little disaffected was some of the ideas being extolled by the group of anti-authoritarian (self-proclaimed anarchist) young men in attendance. One of them lamented the NSA in one sentence, and then expressed concern over “chemtrails” in the next. Many of them identified with Anonymous, complete with Guy Fawkes masks and the insufferably melodramatic aesthetic which characterizes that movements' propaganda. They also endorsed the Zeitgeist Movement, which is a throwback to old utopian socialism inspired by a trilogy of conspiracy-theory laden documentaries created by Peter Joseph.

I don’t know any of the Denver Anonymous kids, so I might be reading too much idealism into a few statements I overheard. But I know substituting conspiracy theories and blind anti-authoritarian rhetoric for a solid materialist understanding of capitalism would not be unusual for inquisitive young anarchists. It’s my estimation that the people (who usually seem to be young men) attracted to those movements and theories have good instincts and motives, it is their sense of justice and their anti-authoritarian instincts which have guided them towards anarchism, but it is that same instinct which allows them to view conspiracy theories as reasonable. They know the world is organized backwards, and they are eager to accept any explanation for the current state of affairs so that they might have somewhere to direct their energy and their anger. They have a sense of their own alienation, but not an articulated consciousness of it. I guess unsubstantiated conspiracy theories are more accessible or easier to digest than solid Marxist and anarchist critiques of capitalism. That’s unfortunate.

I did greet and meet a few people. One homeless vet who has been involved in homeless rights activism on his own saw the sign calling for a repeal of the camping ban and asked me about it. I was able to point him to the Denver Homeless Out Loud website.

Janet Matzen was there; she’s the tireless activist who has been leading boycotts against members of the Downtown Denver Partnership in an effort to get the camping ban repealed. They’ve already convinced two businesses to take a public stance against the ban, and they are currently targeting the Tattered Cover Bookstore having picketed it (while also feeding any hungry passersby) every Friday evening for the past twenty weeks.

My favorite part of the entire event was the banjo player and drummer (members of the band Seizure Rights and pictured above), who were playing songs — both radical and popular — all day.

Haymarket Pamphlet

Wikipedia has a high quality article on the Haymarket affair. I adapted an abridged version into a pamphlet titled “Origins of May Day: The Haymarket Affair.” It is available in several sizes of PDF:

A half-letter sized pamphlet
A regular US Letter sized document
An imposed (US Letter) version ready for printing:
- Print double-sided (short edge) and landscape (takes three sheets)
- Fold sheets and assemble in order
- Put two staples in spine (using long-reach or saddle stapler)
- Trim page edges so they are flush (if necessary)
- Distribute to curious passersby at your next May Day rally!

Other Reports

“Report: May Day in Denver” by Morton Esters of the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement (a Maoist group).
“Denver’s Turn-Out Small but Vigorous” by Randy Robinson of The Dialogue Chronicle (it’s the second story on that page).
“YouTube: A quick look at police watching OWS protesters marking May Day” from The Denver Post.

1. The National Day of Prayer does not always fall on May Day, but two other federal holidays do (less accidentally): Loyalty Day and Law Day.

On the Cecily McMillan Conviction

2014-05-09T15:30:28Z

On Monday, Cecily McMillan was found guilty of felony assault for elbowing a cop in the eye when he was trying to arrest her at an Occupy Wall Street rally in 2012. She is now in jail awaiting sentencing where she’ll face up to seven years in prison. McMillan claimed she reflexively elbowed the officer after he grabbed her right breast. The jury was convinced she elbowed him with criminal intent. There is a video of the incident on YouTube, but it is too dark and grainy to see where the officers' hands were. So I don’t know.

Update: Cecily was sentenced to 90 days of prison and five years of probation. She served 58 days at Rikers Island, and was released in July, 2014. She wrote an article for Cosmopolitan about her experience, “I Went From Grad School to Prison”. In October, 2014, she was tried and acquitted on charges of obstructing police stemming from a separate incident (Colin Moynihan, “Occupy Wall Street Protester Found Not Guilty of Obstruction,” The New York Times, Oct. 10, 2014).

In May 2012, Daivd Graeber reported on an apparent tactic being used by NYPD of assaulting female protesters in an attempt at inciting them or their male companions to react in a criminal manner (“New Police Strategy in New York – Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protestors,” Naked Capitalism, May 2012). I don’t think that the speculation of an intentional tactic has been confirmed, although it is still a disturbing pattern. Later in 2012 a national consortium of law schools released a 132-page report, Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street, documenting “a pattern of abusive and unaccountable protest policing by the NYPD.” The report alleges 130 cases of aggressive or excessive force used by the NYPD in response to Occupy Wall Street. So McMillan’s claims fit within the known NYPD modus operandi, anyway.

Of course the jury was told nothing about those patterns of abuse, or about Officer Bovell’s own history of corruption and abuse. Molly Knefel has a worthwhile article about McMillan’s trial up at the Gaurdian describing how the “hyper-selective retelling of events to the jury mirrored the broader popular narrative of OWS” in which police violence is unquestioningly justified (“Cecily McMillan’s guilty verdict reveals our mass acceptance of police violence,” May 5, 2014).

But then the whole idea of a jury trial is that both sides are given a chance to present an interpretation of the accepted facts in a manner which paints their side in the best light. The jury can then decide on where the truth lies between the two extremes and determine if the facts as they find them meet the elements of the crime. But I’ve experienced a small first-hand taste of how such a method of finding truth between extremes can become rather absurd, and how the state has no qualms in using its status of legitimacy in the minds of jurors to distort the narrative in the courtroom.

I was arrested back when the state police raided Occupy Denver in 2011. During that event, the police disassembled tents and made a big mess of the park. The prosecutor then introduced photographs of that mess at my trial as evidence that the protesters (and by association, I) were messy. Not only was the evidence misleading, it was humorously irrelevant since I had not even been charged with a crime of mess-making.

I was at trial because I had refused a plea bargain. In response to my refusal, the DA added a more serious charge (“obstructing a law officer”) to my alleged crimes. At trial he managed to get my arresting officer to distance himself from his professional integrity by testifying using obviously coached language that I had “obstructed” his actions (testimony, fortunately in my case, the jury did not believe).

Cecily McMillan, maintaining from the beginning that she did not knowingly commit a crime, also refused a plea offer. So it is easy for me to see her vigorous prosecution as a revanchist attempt by the prosecutor to punish her noncooperation. When she was arrested, McMillan was tackled by several police officers. She then suffered a seizure (or series of seizures), and the police prevented street medics from attending to her (while rendering no aid themselves). The City of New York then spent two years (and untold amounts of public money) convicting her of a felony. All of that expense and trouble and careful portrayal of the evidence just to ensure that a girl who had a bad day in 2012 suffers some more.

Denver's October 2011 Uprisings

2014-03-26T16:04:36Z

This post is just a collection of links to some of the media covering the protests which started in Denver on October 15, 2011, the day after the police evicted the Occupy Denver camp (and arrested me).

October 15

The events in Denver on October 15 correspond with a day of global protest, and they apparently prompted an update to the Denver Police Department’s Crowd Control Manual, which was issued on October 19, 2011, as Department Directive 11-07. Recently (January 22, 2016), the folks at Unicorn Riot obtained a heavily redacted copy of that updated manual through Colorado’s Open Records Act. It is available online: “New Document: Denver Police Crowd Control Manual”

“The police moves in on Occupy Denver’s largest gathering yet — with pepper spray (PHOTOS)” — The Westword covered the day with photographs
“Report Back from Occupy Denver Week of Oct. 25” — Report from Colorado Street Medics
“Occupy Denver protesters’ march for peace results in arrests after food tent stirs tensions” — Jordan Steffen for a Denver Post blog.
“Occupy Denver: A 10/15 Photodiary & Updates” — boatsie on Daily Kos
“Denver police spill protesters' blood (PHOTOS, VIDEO)” — RT
“Police attack Occupy protests in Denver, Colorado” — Joseph Kishore for WSWS
Several videos are available on YouTube. I had forgotten how annoying chants and megaphones are.

October 29

Protesters clashed with police every Saturday for several weeks. October 29 may have been the most violent. A 2012 report by Denver’s Office of the Independent Monitor (OIM) highlighted the events of that day:

The decision was made to immediately address the ordinance violations, and a small group of of officers made verbal requests that the tents be dismantled. Although officers made these requests for voluntary compliance, many were outfitted with helmets and other riot gear, which sometimes provokes crowd response. Many demonstrators became physically aggressive, and there were confrontations between protesters and police. The small group of officers was surrounded, and DPD issued an emergency citywide call for additional police assistance. Officers deployed O.C. spray and pepperballs, among other less-than-lethal force options, to maintain a perimeter or skirmish line. Several civilians were injured during the ensuing melee, and many in the crowd were affected by the O.C. spray and struck with pepperballs, including one civilian struck in the face. An officer was trampled, though thankfully not injured. The incident, and the force used, received local and national media attention, and several complaints were filed with the DPD and the OIM.

— p. 15

The independent monitor recommended that the tactics used by the police on October 29 be reviewed by the Tactics Review Board to assess whether they complied with existing policy. The review board declined the recommendation. See also the Westword’s “Occupy Denver: Independent Monitor Criticizes Police, Department of Safety Over Protest Tactics”

“Occupy Denver protesters, law enforcement officers clash; 20 arrested” — Jordan Steffen and Electa Draper, The Denver Post.
“Occupy Denver: Biggest riot squad presence to date, pepper bullets, multiple arrests (PHOTOS)” — Kelsey Whipple, Westword.
“Denver Police Brutalize Occupy Denver” — Tim Paynter
“Denver police move into Occupy encampment” — CBS News
“Denver quiet after police raid Occupy camp” — CBS News
“The Long Blue Line” — A first-hand account by Eclair.
“Police brutality today at Occupy Denver” — A collection of updates and links by Jeremy Bloom of Red Green & Blue.
“DABC update from 3 weeks of social war in Denver, Colorado” — Update from the Denver Anarchist Black Cross who provided prisoner support.
“Police attack on #Occupy Denver” — Photos and links on Indymedia UK.
“Occupy Protesters Regroup After Mass Arrests” — Kirk Johnson, The New York Times.
`Occupy Denver Clash: Police Use Force On Denver Protesters (PHOTOS, VIDEO)`" — An AP report by Kristen Wyatt.
“Police fire mace at Denver protesters, 20 arrested” — Reuters
“Police Use Pepper Spray, Rubber Bullets on Occupy Denver Protesters Trying to Storm Capitol” — The Blaze. Links to additional coverage by local news.
“20 Occupy Denver protesters arrested after clash at capitol” — 9news.
“Occupy Denver: ACLU demands formal investigation of police conduct, pepper ball guns” — The ACLU of Colorado alleged that during these protests the Denver Police Department engaged in abusive use of their batons, violated their own crowd-control policy with their use of pepper balls, and illegally confiscated and destroyed personal belongings, as reported by Kelsey Whipple for Westword.
Again, several videos are available on YouTube.

September 12 and 13

Things flared up again on September 12 as the Denver Police Department developed a violent reflex to the sight of tents. (Yes, I know September is not really October.)

“DPD Denies Medics Access to Unconscious, Unresponsive Patient” — Colorado Street Medics
“Occupy Denver: Large police presence moves in on three tents with pepper spray and arrests” — Kelsey Whipple, Westword.
“Denver police force Occupy Denver to move their property in Civic Center” — Jordan Steffen and Electa Draper, The Denver Post.
“This is war: DABC call for support against state repression” — Update from Denver Anarchist Black Cross
“Police Clear Out Occupy Denver” — A brief first-hand account.
Some videos on YouTube.