Wicked System Down
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The inauguration was my last real protest.
I do recall being at one more event right before the US invaded Afganistan, but my heart and mind were elsewhere by then.
On the drive home from DC we debated the merits of anarchism. All I had in my car was a tape of the Soundbombing album from Rawkus Records, featuring Talib Kweli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundbombing
Hip Hop was the first step on my musical journey after my departure from the realm of jazz. The tape deck was on repeat so he kept asking us all the way home:
Cuz the history we stay weary of various theories. Question evolution and use to pass this lesson through revolution. Ask what not to do (yes), without firepower how is you militant? (yes) That type shit we don’t forget like elephants (never forget) We stompin black holes in space. If you tore this wicked system down, what would you build in its place? You gotta plan then we rollin (come on), don’t waste my time.
It was like he was speaking directly to me. I wanted answers to those questions too, and I wasn’t getting them. Not from other activists. Not from Noam Chomsky. Not from anyone. Chomsky was called an anarchist. But I found it hard to imagine him wearing a hoodie and slashing tires. I searched in vain to find any place where he explained how a society built on anarchist principles was really supposed to work.
And then how do you know if it really works?
And then what does it take to get from here to there? As in, with millions of real people’s lives hanging in the balance while we transition from one type of society to another? It didn’t seem feasible.
To me it seemed like anarchism was mostly a statement of opposition to the neoliberal world order. They were critics of capitalism as opposed to developers of a post-capitalist civilization. I’m sure a lot of people would argue with me there. But that’s how I saw it at the time and to be perfectly honest my view hasn’t changed much.
When pressed for examples of anarchism in practice, they would normally point to the Spanish Civil War. But even in the most charitable interpretation, this is a limited data set to learn from given the problems we were facing under under modern, global capitalism.
Of course, articulate, militant critics of neoliberalism were needed then and are even more important today. All of the suffering deserves to be documented at the very least. It is also not true that anarchists don’t do anything constructive. The people I protested with housed and fed the homeless, ran community gardens and engaged in local politics to fend off service cuts and to protect public spaces. They organized study groups and fought to normalize urban bicycling, an effort which has now gone mainstream.
But still, I was looking for a blueprint, or a theory, or a plan of some kind. Some sort of revolutionary vision; one that was so compelling that it would make sense to throw sand in the gears of this civilization in hopes of accelerating the transition to a better one. But I wasn’t getting that vision from the anarchists.
Another thing is that the shattering glass and the bursting tires and the batons flying inches from my face was all a bit much for me. My protest buddy was in a lot of pain after getting hit in the abdomen that afternoon. My wound was fully healed by then but it was still tender if you pushed on it. I worried that I couldn’t take a hit like the one she took.
Still, my mind was open to that sort of civil disobedience. It was a truly wicked system and I couldn’t just comply with it, even though I was feeling the temptation to do exactly that. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet, or something.
But what kind of omelete were we making?
