by David Zlutnick, of The Friendly Fire Collective
This September I will most likely be traveling to Pittsburgh to join in for the protests against the G20 Economic Summit. Inspired by recent summits (including the G20 in London and NATO in Strasbourg) and excited by the potential offered to anti-authoritarians by the string of summits in North America in the coming year (Pittsburgh, the Vancouver Olympics, and Canada’s hosting of the G8), I find myself oddly giddy at the prospect of taking to the streets in Pittsburgh. But I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe writing through these ideas will help me develop my thoughts…
Why Would I Go to Another Summit?
Largely, summits are not extremely appealing to me. I feel that our battle as revolutionaries, anti-authoritarians, anarchists, or whatever we may call ourselves, is for hearts and minds. Our overall goals are to change social relations, fundamentally change the way people interact with one another, develop new values divergent from individualism, accumulation, and ascendancy, and bring about social equality while abolishing hierarchies. To me it seems that in order to do this we need to lend ourselves and our resources to struggles at the local level, jumping in for the long haul, participating in the day-to-day organizing not near as sexy as the summit.
At times it can be disheartening to see anarchists pour hundreds or even thousands of dollars into attending a summit, commit limited resources to building infrastructure for a summit, and dedicating weeks to organizing for and then attending a summit, while at the same time we often lack the capacity to organize long-term campaigns, coordinate outreach and education, or obtain and maintain space for our projects. Because of this my initial excitement at the prospect of a summit is often overwritten by practicality. Isn’t a lot of the summit just anarchist adventurism?
However, at the same time, I recognize the summit as having a lot to offer anarchists that cannot be written off. For one, on the personal level, it is often very inspiring for radicals to be present at such a concentration of capitalist economic or political power and able to challenge it directly in the streets, facing off with the foot soldiers of authoritarian institutions arm-in-arm with their comrades. All very romantic indeed, and it often does the trick to get new folks hooked, veteran activists re-inspired, or spark a new wave of organizing (as it has here in the Bay Area with UA-in-the-Bay springing out of the anti-DNC/RNC organizing last summer).
Summits also offer a chance for radical ideas to be inserted into the mainstream through media coverage, if the media chooses to cover the opposition. By creating a spectacle and mainstream media picking up on the story of protests, at times this creates the opportunity for a counter-argument to be inserted challenging the dominant narrative espoused by the summit, whether it be an economic dogma or a party line. The catch of course is the big question: Will the media cover the protests? And if they do cover the protests, what will they say? Although the latter may not be as important as just receiving coverage and presenting some sort of oppositional dialogue, at least in some basic form—as in, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
Additionally, summits give radicals from a variety of regions a chance to be in one place at the same time. This can be important just psychologically to know there is a movement outside of your community. It also means that networking is possible, links can be made to other groups and individuals, resistance can be coordinated. And summits are often a good opportunity to put prefigurative politics into place, practicing what we preach by organizing on a non-hierarchical basis, by consensus, and working on developing modes of reaching agreement and solving conflict.
For the reasons above, both pro and con, I find myself swaying back and forth between excitement and disappointment at the prospect of buying a plane ticket to Pittsburgh.
But it’s the G20! Pittsburgh represents the extreme concentration of international economic might that is constantly and consistently accumulating capital at the expense of millions upon billions of subjugated and destroyed human lives. Although that may not be the most analytic indictment of the G20, it’s ultimately the case. At this moment in history, how can you pass up the opportunity to challenge this sort of corrupt power? Even if the protests will not at all alter the course of international economic policy (which I can’t see them doing), we can’t just let them meet in calm, right? Don’t we have to try?
So why do I still find myself so ambivalent? As I sit here and ponder my indecision, staring blankly at my computer screen, I recall many conversations I’ve had debating the effectiveness of organizing against summits. What I often find myself coming back to in my critique is the disconnectedness of organizing around these events where little concrete achievement can often be seen. And thinking further, this doesn’t go only for summits, but is applicable to a larger critique of anarchist organizing. Anarchists at this point largely bounce from action to action, event to event, summit to summit, without sitting down and identifying goals, both short-term and long-term, and how they will achieve them. For much of it there seems to be a significant lack of intention, an absence of connection between our rhetoric and our actions. And even less of a concern between the success of our methods and the achievement of our objectives.
Pittsburgh: Tactics vs. Strategy
Our tactics are often considered for long hours, many meetings, and over multiple cups of coffee or pints of beer. How do we shut this down? What do we need to do it? What will happen when we do this? What will happen when they do that? After all, don’t we want our protests to see a “diversity of tactics” employed? Don’t we want those tactics to be successful?
The catch is, no matter how successful our tactics are in themselves, if they are not linked in achieving a larger goal, their significance is considerably diminished. The link between tactics—successful or otherwise—is strategy, a plan of action designed to achieve a specific goal, a basic concept often overlooked or under-prioritized in anti-authoritarian organizing. Tactics are the methods used in an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is an issue of tactics, but whether the battle should be fought at all is an issue of strategy.
Which brings us back to Pittsburgh. The initial question for anarchists should not be how to fight this battle, but should this battle be fought? I believe the answer is yes. But it is one that everyone should ask themselves before planning begins. What is our ultimate goal? How does confronting the G20 help us move toward this? What tactics can we employ on the ground that will help us realize this? If these questions aren’t answered, or at least thoroughly discussed, then whatever resistance happens in Pittsburgh is likely to take its place in history relatively unnoticed just as most summits have in the past.
So taking the streets in Pittsburgh, as it stands now is it a strategy or a tactic? Or both? I want to issue a fair warning that I don’t know the motivations of all the anarchists across the country and what they’re talking about as reasons for going—or if they are. Perhaps I’m dead wrong, and everyone has already had this conversation with their friends, or at least thoroughly thought through the idea themselves. However—aside from some statements coming out of Pittsburgh itself—from what I’ve seen so far in the theory of the anti-G20 run-up, both locally and beyond, I’m worried anarchists are following in the line of similar summit protests and the G20 hasn’t evolved to be anything beyond another chance to be in the street, largely devoid of strategy. A tactic for tactic’s sake.
In the conversations I’ve taken part in, in the postings I’ve read online, in the propaganda I’ve seen, it has almost all focused on two days in Pittsburgh. Almost nothing has addressed the bigger question: why take on the G20? Some very positive writing, at least in my view, has developed from those organizers in Pittsburgh attempting to answer that question and look at how this summit is an opportunity beyond the two days that it will be in town. However, this is a question that should be reflected on continuously from all points in the movement. Developing movement strategy isn’t something that should be put solely on the city that is more or less obligated to take up the counter-summit organizing. The G20 is one of many summits that anarchists will attempt to crash in the coming year and in the future. If challenging summits is a tactic we plan on using—as it obviously is—then it is absolutely necessary that we look at why we challenge them and what we hope to achieve by doing so. This conversation needs to be prevalent and pervasive.
Placing Pittsburgh into a Plan
Again, we should examine—in the case of Pittsburgh as in all our organizing—what are our goals? For me, my goals in anarchist organizing are to change people’s minds and initiate another set of values altogether different from those that thrive under the present social structures, and to encourage the imagination of another type of system compatible with these new ideals. So, strategically does Pittsburgh offer an opportunity to advance toward this goal? While I find it very doubtful that we’ll be able to shutdown the G20 in Pittsburgh, significantly affect the policy prescriptions decided upon at that summit, or even necessarily be able to claim some meaningful victory that day, there is extreme importance in being out in the street and actively and aggressively challenging the power structures present. What I believe the tactic of protesting summits offers most concretely is an opportunity to speak out loud and clear against a certain paradigm, and with any luck that message will ring out through the media’s coverage of the event. The G20 therefore offers an opportunity to broadcast a counter to the hegemony of the capitalist economic model that it puts forward.
I have been impressed with the Pittsburghers who have begun organizing there and their seeming effort to draw in the global issues to the local level, seeking to mobilize their own communities as well as build support for the protests (and protesters). The Pittsburgh Organizing Group’s call, “Resist the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh” (http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090610193012591), was a great statement that began to fuse the protests into both a tactic and a strategy. They seem to agree with me—or rather I seem to agree with them—that “Our power is not in whether or not we have the ability to prevent a bunch of finance ministers and heads of state from talking. The real importance is in the way an undisrupted ceremony reinforces the dominant worldview. If that view is flawed, it must be rejected, and the spotlight such a gathering creates must be one in which people will manifest liberating social conflict.” Stating that “the necessary attempts of thousands to interfere with the summit are not an ends in and of themselves,” they then mark two goals of the actions: “to heighten existing social resistance, and to present an alternative narrative of why our world is the way it is.”
While I don’t see the complete framing of a strategy in POG’s statement, or how the actions against the G20 will complement future anarchist organizing, I believe it’s on the right track and I hope this is an initial step toward the development of further strategic vision, both from within Pittsburgh as well as from the movement as a whole. But at the very least the basic goals presented transcend the two days of the G20 summit. If these are the two goals to work with, this now raises a ton of follow-up questions that need to be answered to ensure that we have tactics that will let us achieve our objectives. If the idea is to show a rejection of capitalism and capitalist solutions to the crisis through being in the streets, what tactics do we employ to make this possible? How do we get the media to focus on the protests and broadcast our rejection? And if they do set their cameras on the protests, how do we get our message out as clear as possible, that not only is there resistance, but there is another way forward? These questions need answers, but ones I’m hesitant to try and break into here and now. These call for long meetings full of coffee and beer.
Strategy Beyond Pittsburgh
But strategic thinking isn’t something needing to happen only in regards to summits. Through discourse we may find summits to be one valuable part of our strategy, but hopefully that isn’t the only tactic we employ. As I mentioned earlier in my short critique of summit protesting, I believe that long-term, sustained community organizing is really where it’s at. For approaching this we also have to have the same conversations examining goals and methods.
As a brief example, an organization I work with now is looking at the possibility of working around issues of housing defense in evictions and/or foreclosures. During preliminary discussions, most of the conversations focused on tactics we might use, including exciting ideas around direct actions, outreach, etc. Enthusiasm was high, but what soon became apparent was the actions folks were so excited to begin were missing their larger context and that goals needed to be defined and strategy developed, so the actions aren’t carried out just so something happens but so what we want to do gets done.
I’m happy to say that although the organizing around this project is on hold for the moment (because of a range of other engagements, including the G20), when it resumes it sounds as though the emerging development of tactics will be well-thought through and in line with what we hope to achieve. This could mean possibly forgoing the more appealing direct actions, at least in the interim, in lieu of the less dramatic tactics involving long-term relationship building like going door-to-door, holding neighborhood meetings, etc., if this is what makes our organizing more successful. However, this is something only time will tell when these discussions continue.
It All Comes Down to: Are We in it to Win?
Well, at the very least by writing this I’m feeling more comfortable with my excitement for Pittsburgh. Whether or not this is helpful for anyone else remains to be seen. Of course I am still unsure, as my own personal recognition of why I believe the G20 is important and could fit into a developing long-term strategy doesn’t mean shit in the scheme of things. Hopefully, though, this will at least encourage further discussion and perhaps even lead to more intentional anarchist organizing, something we all could stand to benefit from. Because we know damn well our formidable foes got some strategy up their sleeves, whether we do or not.
It’s important to remember that while the ultimate goals of anarchists may be similar, shorter-term goals will be different for most folks involved in the anti-authoritarian movement and therefore strategy may differ slightly as well. This divergence is important and the disparities should be discussed openly and at length within anti-authoritarian circles, looking for points of commonality and constructively examining points of contention in hopes of advancing toward unified objectives.
For anarchists, generally, it seems there is a severe lack of discussion over strategy and where we want to take our ideas. Of course it is impossible to form an overarching idea of strategy throughout the entire anarchist movement, but what we can do is within our own groups and organizations, or locally and regionally, develop plans of action linked not by type of tactic, but achievement of goals. Are we aiming for complete anarchy and the abolition of the state? Are we trying to end the war and smash militarism? Are we looking for an end to racism, patriarchy, heterosexism? Are we trying to get the cops off our block? Okay, what are we going to do to make that happen? There is no action, protest, or black bloc that is single-handedly going accomplish those goals. We must look at what all our tactical decisions are hoping to accomplish, how they will be linked and complement each other, and how they will aid in the development of continued resistance. If we are employing tactics without strategy that means we are reacting not acting, only proceeding defensively instead of taking the bull by the horns. It all comes down to answering this question: Are we in it to win? If the answer is yes, we need to talk.
David Zlutnick is a contributor to and member of The Friendly Fire Collective, currently living and working in San Francisco and trying to find more time to talk about strategy.
