by Ian Alan Paul of the Friendly Fire Collective
This article is meant to develop an analysis of the spectacular nature of the upcoming confrontations at the DNC/RNC, and contemplates how the North American anti-authoritarian movement can relate to this specific type of summit protest. Will the movement be successful in breaking down the spectacle of ‘law and order’, or will we continue to be marginalized by its message?
Setting the Stage for Confrontation
With the Democratic and Republican national conventions just over the horizon, it has become time to think both tactically and strategically about how we can best direct our collective power in the streets of Denver and St. Paul. While some of our past manifestations of resistance have focused on disruption as both the means and the ends, particularly during economic summits (WTO, World Bank, EU, IMF, etc), what makes mobilizing against the DNC/RNC fundamentally different is that these events are not defined by decision making processes, but are instead defined by theatre. At one point in American history, the conventions actually served as a battleground within each party to nominate their respective candidates. However, conventions in recent times have become spectacles put on for the partisan bourgeois in an attempt to turn out votes in November and to garner support for the American electoral system. The latter function of the conventions seems to be even more pressing now than in recent history, as the faith in this electoral system seems to be corroding. With the failure to successfully occupy Iraq, a depressed economy throwing members of the middle class out of their homes, and unprecedented environmental devastation, the disasters caused by the current system are no longer contained to foreign countries and their peoples, but are instead being experienced by the working class within the belly of the beast. The spectacle put forth by the ruling class, that the government is serving public interests and that the population must be protected from terrorists at any cost, is being questioned by the public on the largest scale since September 11th.
When we as a movement decide to dedicate our efforts to disrupting events like the DNC/RNC, we must be aware that what we are disrupting is not the literal functioning of government or representative democracy, but rather the functioning of political spectacle. While it seems as though the street tactics that will be used in both mobilizations has already been determined by the movement in some sense (through the transparent organization of blockades, black blocs, etc), there still seems to be a gap in understanding as to how we as an antiauthoritarian movement relate to the spectacle of democracy and terrorism. It is essential that we develop praxis centered on how we hope to most effectively utilize our voice in relation to these ideas and effectively seize this opportunity to crack the foundations of faith in representative democracy and capitalism. If we want to maintain agency and have a voice outside of the confines of our own movement, we need to have a strategy for not only confronting this spectacle, but we must also be able to open dialogue about the complexity and beauty of our actions, politics and ideas.
The Theatre of Terror
While we hope to disrupt their spectacle of law an order, it is important for us to realize our role in the current global theatre of symbols and meaning manufactured by those in power under the current structure. Since the events of September 2001, the ruling class has created a new dominant narrative for a post 9/11 world. The people that occupy this new theatre of terror have been forcibly split into two distinct and opposite groups. On one side of the spectacle are the agents of order and security, the guardians of the status quo, and on the other side is an omnipresent network of anarchic terrorists bent on ending the modern world. Through the production and proliferation of this worldview (or spectacle), governments and corporations have had free reign to implement their policies of police-state-ism and exploitative neoliberal economics, justifying these policies as our last option to combat the ‘new enemy’ and protect democracy.
The military-entertainment complex, or the synergy between the police state, the terror spectacle, and capital, has successfully caused this binary worldview (us versus them, democracy versus terrorism) to become the dominant paradigm soon after the towers fell. According to this narrative, the American public has never faced an enemy so menacing, inhuman, chaotic and undefeatable until now. It seems that they would like you to forget about the threat of communism, which was portrayed remarkably like the terrorist networks of today and was used to implement very similar policies. This terror spectacle has given us such enlightening phrases as “freedom isn’t free”, and has allowed for unprecedented repression against radicals of all tendencies in the name of “law and order”. If we are to be successful in stopping more than just the buses carrying delegates at the DNC/RNC, we must be able to disrupt their spectacle and tear down the facades of the capitalist theatre as well. The most successful way to do this, I would argue, is not to create a counter-spectacle containing an opposite worldview, but rather pose the questions which inherently destabilize power and decenter the production of meaning in our society.
I think it is important to emphasize that the power of our movement lies not in the answers that we may imagine laying in a future utopian society, as this line of thinking has only produced authoritarian groups unwilling to challenge power structures and instead seek to only supplement who is in power. Instead, I am suggesting that we must find the power of our movement in questions: in the questioning of power, in the questioning of violence, and in the questioning of the status quo. It is through this radical gesture that we can hope to create room for new meanings and new social formations to exist in our cultural geography. So long as the people in power in our society continue to successfully control the definitions and boundaries of whom a terrorist is, and what type of response is appropriate to enact upon ‘them’, our movement will be marginalized and controlled by this modern spectacle. Similarly, as long as the state is able to define what violence is justified and what violence is not, our movement will be pushed to the fringes of society. One of our central objectives when confronting power at these sites of struggle must be to destabilize the ideas that support these institutions. Through the deliberate creation of cognitive dissonance, dissonance between their spectacle of law and order and our actions in the streets, we can profoundly alter the nature of discourse and thought in our society and not allow the theatre of terror to progress any further.
Breaking the Spell
When we begin to see a trend of European style ‘Summit Hopping’ as one of the defining qualities of the antiauthoritarian movement, we must question ourselves as to why it’s important to confront power at such sites in the first place. Rarely have we been successful at actually stopping the functioning of summits and conventions, and even if we accomplished such a disruption we would not achieve the nonhierarchical society we are fighting for. I believe that the answer lies not in our explicit tactical goals (in the case of the RNC/DNC blockading the streets), but rather in the long-term strategies for the movement beyond the conventions. The spectacle/reality that is being manufactured by both parties in the electoral system is becoming more and more of a farce in the eyes of the general public as the ruling class’ policies and military operations begin to self-destruct all around them. One of the functions of our manifestations is to cause a break in this narrative, essentially shifting the focus from their plans to deregulate the economy and ‘democratize’ the Middle East to our plans to transform North American society.
In the now infamous WTO protests in Seattle, windows were smashed, streets were blockaded and teargas hung low over the business district for days, but we failed as a movement to physically stop enough representatives to disrupt the decision-making process of the multitude of nation-states. Yet, it is important to note that despite our tactical failure to stop the meetings, Seattle is still remembered as one of North America’s greatest manifestations of resistance and continues to inspire new generations of radicals. The power of our movement blossomed not in the physical blockades of downtown or in the bricks thrown through “Nike Town” storefront windows, but rather in the images and symbolic significance of these events being propagated into the imaginations of the global radical Left. What this has meant on a very base level is that the current formations of power (in this case corporations and neoliberal governments) were vulnerable to attack. This new narrative that was created in the streets of Seattle showed that there were people resisting and forcing history in a new direction, very much away from the future desired by the heads of the WTO member-states. This particular effect has been described by people participating in the demonstrations as “breaking the spell”; which essentially was a strategy aimed at snapping people out of the spectacle of law and order. From the streets of Seattle, the WTO began its long decent towards impotency and summit protests began to blossom all around the world in what is now known as the anti-globalization movement.
Similarly, the mobilization against the G8 summit in the fields of Heiligendamm, Germany failed to stop the leaders of the world from holding their meetings, but that isn’t what was important about holding the demonstrations in the first place. Why the demonstrations were largely hailed as a success was not due to the fact that the roads were successfully blockaded, or that we witnessed the return of widespread militant tactics from the European Autonomen, but rather that a mass international manifestation of resistance confronted the global power-structures in the German countryside. In essence, it was the profound collective refusal of the current society that made the resistance to the G8 so significant to the global Left.
Occupying the Other Factory
In the coming month, the spectacle of representative democracy will be confronted head-on by the reality of our resistance, and the old capitalist society will be forced to stare into the eyes of our resistance. This is significant not because of the physical confrontations in the coming weeks but rather because the current structures’ spectacle of “law and order” will be challenged by our militant denial of the status quo. The only question that remains to be resolved is whether our collective refusal will speak louder and clearer than their conventions singing the praises of the American political system. While on one hand we must seriously consider which tactics are best suited to disrupt the functioning of the convention and to evade/fight the police, at the same time we must have the creativity and vision to act in ways which inspire and attack the current system on the level of spectacle and of ideas. Surely, if we spend so much time attacking and deconstructing the current formations of power, we must at the same time be able to articulate our envisioned alternatives to hierarchy and domination.
The events of September 11th did a great deal to immobilize the radical Left in North America, largely due to the theatre of terror echoed by every media outlet in the country. American society has been dominated by the current spectacle of “law and order”, and the Left has been unable to create narratives that effectively challenge the dominant spectacle. The ‘other factories’, the sites where these spectacles are manufactured and replicated, have been incredibly centralized in our society and have allowed for a massive concentration of power and wealth in very little time. Having strategies to occupy these “other factories”, the factories of spectacle and of theatre, should be as much of a part of our movement strategy as street tactics have been in the past.
It is absurd to suggest that in order to be successful we need to collectively consense on ‘our’ message during these summits – by doing so we would only silence one of the most powerful parts of our movement. It is precisely our plurality and our diversity that have led us to success in the past, and it is in these traits that we can find the vocal chords needed for future confrontations. Rather than speak and act using the stale voice of a vanguard (the authoritarian voice), we instead can choose to yell with the gravity of all of our voices. With the multitude of our critiques, poems, actions and ideas we can disrupt the spectacle at both conventions by exterminating the notion of national consensus and uniformity. We must be able to ask the questions that do not allow for simple answers, questions that are able to demolish assumptions and change the way the world is perceived. If we are to gain power as a movement, we must be able to move away from the spectacle of terror and towards a world of diversity, beauty and complexity. Our collective manifestation has to transcend marginalization and become more than the sum of our street actions – it must strive to create the vocabulary and poetry of a new society outside of the walls and categories of the old one.
Ian Alan Paul is an artist and writer currently living in San Francisco and is a member of the Friendly Fire Collective.
