View source for Ethnography of Direct Action

'''Book: David Graeber. Direct Action, an Ethnography. AK Press, 2009'''

URL = http://www.akpress.org/2009/items/directactionakpress


=Overview=


AK Press:

“In the best tradition of participant-observation, anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first detailed ethnographic study of the global justice movement. Starting from the assumption that, when dealing with possibilities of global transformation and emerging political forms, a disinterested, “objective” perspective is impossible, he writes as both scholar and activist. At the same time, his experiment in the application of ethnographic methods to important ongoing political events is a serious and unique contribution to the field of anthropology, as well as an inquiry into anthropology’s political implications.

The case study at the center of Direct Action is the organizing and events that led to the dramatic protest against the Summit of the Americas in Québec City in 2001. Written in a clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal conversations in coffee shops to large “spokescouncil” planning meetings and teargas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a vivid and fascinating picture. Along the way, he addresses matters of deep interest to anthropologists: meeting structure and process, language, symbolism, representation, the specific rituals of activist culture, and much more.”


=Author's Motivation=

"I am making no pretense of objectivity here. I did not become involved in this
movement in order to write an ethnography. I became involved as a participant.
I come from an old leftist family, and for most of my life have considered myself
an anarchist. If for most of my life, I also rarely got involved in anarchist politics,
it was mainly because, in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the anarchist politics
I was exposed to struck me as petty, atomized, and pointlessly contentious—
full of would-be sectarians whose sects consisted only of themselves. To suddenly
discover the existence of a movement with a radically different sensibility, which
placed enormous emphasis on mutual respect, cooperation, and egalitarian decision-
making, was profoundly exhilarating. It was as if the movement I’d always
wanted to be part of had suddenly come into existence. Even when I’m critical
of the movement, I’m critical as an insider, someone whose ultimate purpose is
to further its goals. My eventual decision to write an ethnography emerged from
the same impulse. To some degree, of course, as a trained ethnographer you can’t
really help yourself. Almost as soon as I got involved, I found that the notes I was
taking at meetings were growing more and more detailed. They started containing
little observations about hair and shoe styles, posture, habits, parenthetical
reflections on little activist rituals. Still, my decision to write all this up in ethnographic
form came largely because, as a participant, it struck me as an important
way of furthering one of the movement’s goals: the dissemination of a certain
vision of democratic possibility. In my anthropological training, I had acquired a
skill that seemed perfectly suited for conveying much of what was missing from
existing accounts of the movement. Though it did also occur to me that doing so
would also make an extremely interesting ethnography."

=Excerpts=


==Remembering 2001==

David Graeber:

"It is sometimes hard to remember, nowadays, just what the days of the
Washington Consensus were like. Perhaps it might be best to start then with a
word of context, to help understand why it was that the Zapatista rebellion in
1994 served as such a catalyst for the global movement against neoliberalism that
followed, and why that movement came to take the form it did.

The years just before the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas announced itself to
the world were probably the most depressing time to be a revolutionary—or even,
dedicated to the ideals of the Left—in living memory. It wasn’t the collapse of
the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe that was depressing; most radicals were
glad to see them go. What was depressing was what happened afterwards. With
Stalinism dead, most Marxists expected to see a renaissance of more humane
forms of Marxism. Social democrats believed that they had finally won the argument
with the revolutionary Left and expected to shepherd the former subjects
of the Soviet bloc into their fold; a reasonable expectation, since when polled,
most of the population of Central and Eastern Europe said they wanted to model
their new economies on Sweden. Instead, they got shock therapy and the most
savage form of unrestricted capitalism. In almost every way, the world seemed
to be heading for a nightmare scenario. The romantic image of the guerilla insurrectionary,
which captured so many imaginations in the 1960s, was cascading
into a kind of obscene self-parody. Already in the 1980s, the Right, which
had been arguing for years that guerilla insurgencies in places like Vietnam, or
Zimbabwe, or El Salvador were not spontaneous but fiendish schemes created by
foreign ideologues, began to put their own theories into practice, with the US
and South African intelligence agencies creating guerilla armies like the contras
or RENAMO to sic on leftist regimes. At the same time, existing Marxist guerilla
movements from Columbia to Angola that had begun full of high-minded
rhetoric were increasingly prone to become pure bandit kings, or nihilistic armies
without any cause beyond their own rebellion (those which held to the old ideal
of social transformation, like the Shining Path in Peru, seemed if anything even
worse). Liberation movements everywhere were transforming into vicious ethnic
wars. Then came the wave of genocide, of which Rwanda and the former
Yugoslavia were only the most dramatic and visible.

On a dozen interlocking registers simultaneously, the emerging pattern seemed
catastrophic. It seemed like it would go something like this: On an international
level, capitalism was transforming itself into a revolutionary force. Abandoning
the welfare-state version of capitalism that had actually won the Cold War, the
old Cold Warriors and their corporate sponsors were demanding a pure, no-holdsbarred,
free-market version that had never actually existed, and were willing to
wreak havoc on all existing institutional social arrangements in order to achieve
it. All this involved a kind of weird inversion. The standard right-wing line, since
at least the 1790s, had always been that revolutionary dreams were dangerous
precisely because they were utopian: they ignored the real complexity of social
life, tradition, authority, and human nature, and dreamed of reshaping the world
according to some abstract ideal. By the 1990s, the places had been completely
reversed. The Left had largely abandoned utopianism (and the more it did so, the
more it shriveled and collapsed), and even as they did so, the Right picked it up.
Free-market “reformers” overnight began declaring themselves revolutionaries—
the problem was, they did so as the worst sorts of Stalinists, essentially telling
the world’s poor that science had proved there was only one way to go forward
in history, that this was understood by a scientifically trained elite, and that,
therefore, they had to shut up and do as they were told because, even though
their prescriptions might cause enormous suffering, death, and dislocation in the
present, at some point in the future (they were not sure quite when) it would all
lead to a paradise of peace and prosperity. The fact that the “science” itself had
shifted from historical materialism to free-market economics was a fairly minor
detail; anyway, it makes it easier to explain how former Stalinists from Romania
to Vietnam found it so easy to simply switch hats and declare themselves neoliberals.
Meanwhile, as structural adjustment policies stripped away what small
social protections had existed for the poorest inhabitants of the planet, propaganda
and statistical manipulation had become so effective that most mainstream
Americans who paid attention to such matters were convinced that conditions for
the world’s poorest were actually improving, and not just in areas like East Asia
that had mostly refused to adopt neoliberal policies.

Every progressive victory seemed to have been threatened or reversed. In
South Africa, generations of struggle had finally eliminated racial apartheid; a
moment of happiness, certainly, but an almost identical system was being created
on a global scale, based on increasingly militarized borders, and on a labor migration
regime where, for those trapped in poor countries, residence in rich, largely
white countries was dependent on possession of identity papers and willingness
to work in jobs the residents themselves weren’t willing to do. Feminism was being
retrenched. Former victories over sweatshop labor, child labor, even chattel
slavery, were all being eroded or downright eradicated.

Much of the problem stemmed precisely from the rout of the dream of social
revolution, and those utopian fantasies that had always been necessary to inspire
people to the passion and self-sacrifice required to actually work to transform the
world in the direction of greater freedom and greater equality. I am referring here
to genuine, living utopianism—the idea that radical alternatives are possible and
that one can begin to create them in the present—as opposed to what might be
called “scientific utopianism”: the idea that the revolutionary is the agent of the
inevitable march of history, which was so easily, and catastrophically, appropriated
by the Right. The murder of dreams could only lead to nightmares. It made
it almost impossible to form a center from which to fight the incursions of the
(now super-charged, revolutionary) Right. Social Democratic parties in Europe,
for example, which were born from a reformist strain of Marxism, first seemed
rather pleased with the collapse of their revolutionary cousins—they had finally
won the argument—until they realized that their own appeal, and the willingness
of capitalists to engage with them, was almost entirely based on their ability
to position themselves as the less threatening alternative. Before long, the social
democratic regimes had experienced such a moral and political collapse that the
few still in power were reduced to becoming the agents for the dismantling of
the welfare states they had originally created. The activist Left in industrialized
countries was becoming increasingly reactionary, capable of mobilizing passions
only to defend things that already existed—the ozone layer, affirmative action
programs, trees—and increasingly ineffectively. Elsewhere, it seemed in neartotal
collapse.

Then, finally, there was “globalization.”

As Anna Tsing (2002) has recently reminded us, there’s a curious history
here. The notion really began as a progressive one. It was a stronger version of
internationalism: the sense not only that all men are brothers but that we are the
common custodians of a single, fragile planet—an idea encapsulated by photographs
of the earth taken from outer space by astronauts in the 1960s. The 1990s
rhetoric of globalization had none of this. Essentially, it had two legs: one was that
telecommunications—and particularly the Internet—were annihilating distance
and making instant contact possible between any part of the planet; the other was
that the fall of the Iron Curtain and other barriers to trade were, at the same time,
creating a single, unified global market, whose financial mechanisms could then
operate through these same instantaneous electronic means. Mainly, it was just
about the power of finance capital. But the rhetoric was usually accompanied by a
series of very broad generalizations: that not only money but products, ideas, and
people were “flowing” about as never before, national economies could no longer
dream of being autonomous; old nationalist ideologies, indeed, national borders,
were becoming increasingly irrelevant, and so on. All of this was presented as
happening all of its own accord. Technologies advanced, people were increasingly
in contact with one another: the only possible language for them to deal with one
another was trade—since capitalism was, after all, rooted in human nature.

For anyone who was really paying attention, of course, the reality was very
different. Borders were not being effaced, but reinforced. Poor populations were
still penned into their countries of origin (in which existing social benefits were
being rapidly withdrawn). “Globalization” merely referred to the ability of finance
capital to skip around as it wished and take advantage of that fact. Most
of all, however, the period of “globalization”—or neoliberalism, as it came to
be known just about everywhere except America—saw the creation of the first
genuinely planetary bureaucratic system in human history.
In retrospect, I very much imagine that this is how the last years of the twendtieth century will be seen. The UN had of course existed since mid-century, but
the UN had never had more than moral authority. What was being patched
together now was a system with teeth. At the top were the financiers—bankers,
currency traders, hedge-fund operators, and the like—all connected electronically.

There were the gigantic bureaucratically-organized transnationals that during
this period were absorbing and consolidating literally millions of formerly
independent enterprises. There were the global trade bureaucrats—International
Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), and so
on, but also including institutions like the US Federal Reserve, treaty organizations
like the European Union (EU) or North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA)—whose chief role seemed to be to protect the interests of the first two.

And, finally, there were the various tiers of NGOs, whose role, from providing
farm credits to inoculating infants or providing food during famines, increasingly
came to be to provide services that states had once been expected to supply, but
had effectively now been forbidden from doing by the IMF. The remarkable thing
was that this was achieved through an ideology of radical individualism: above
all, a broad rejection of the claims of common community—and political community
in particular. We were all to be rational individuals on the market, aiming
to acquire goods. Insofar as we were different, it was to be a matter of personal
self-realization through consumption, since consumption, in turn, was assumed
to be largely about the creation and expression of identities. Then, of course,
identity could be said to circle back: since all political and economic questions
were assumed to be effectively settled (history, in this respect, was over) identity
politics became about the only politics that could be considered legitimate."


==Some Organizational History==

From Feminism to Seattle, David Graeber (Chapter 5):

"When the feminist movement began, it was organizationally very simple. Its
basic units were small consciousness-raising circles; the approach was informal,
intimate, and anti-ideological. Most of the first groups emerged directly from
New Left circles. Insofar as they placed themselves in relation to a previous radical
tradition, it was usually anarchism. While the informal organization proved
extremely well suited for consciousness-raising, as groups turned to planning actions,
and particularly as they grew larger, problems tended to develop. Almost
invariably, such groups came to be dominated by an “inner circle” of women who
were, or had become, close friends. The nature of the inner circle would vary, but
somehow one would always emerge. As a result, in some groups lesbians would
end up feeling excluded, in others the same thing would happen to straight women.
Other groups would grow rapidly in size and then see most of the newcomers
quickly drop out again as there was no way to integrate them. Endless debates
ensued. One result was an essay called “[[Structurelessness|The Tyranny of Structurelessness]],” written
by Mary Jo Freeman in 1970 and first published in 1972—a text still avidly
read by organizers of all sorts in the present day. Freeman’s argument is fairly
simple. No matter how sincere one’s dedication to egalitarian principles, the fact
is that in any activist group, different members will have different skills, abilities,
experience, personal qualities, and levels of dedication. As a result, some sort of
elite or leadership structure will inevitably develop. In a lot of ways, having an
unacknowledged leadership structure, she argued, can be a lot more damaging
than having a formal one: at least with a formal structure it’s possible to establish
precisely what’s expected of those who are doing the most important, coordinative
tasks and hold them accountable.

One reason for the essay’s ongoing popularity is that it can be used to support
such a wide variety of positions. Liberals and socialists regularly cite “The
Tyranny of Structurelessness” as a justification for why any sort of anarchist organization
is bound to fail, as a charter for a return to older, top-down styles of
organization, replete with executive offices, steering committees, and the like.
Egalitarians object that even to the extent this is true, it is far worse to have a
leadership that feels fully entitled to its power than one that has to take accusations
of hypocrisy seriously. Anarchists, therefore, have usually read Freeman’s
argument as a call to formalize group process to ensure greater equality, and, in
fact, most of her concrete suggestions—clarifying what tasks are assigned to what
individuals, finding a way for the group to review those individuals’ performance,
distributing responsibilities as widely as possible (perhaps by rotation), ensuring
all have equal access to information and resources—were clearly meant to precisely
that end.

Within the larger feminist movement itself, most of these arguments eventually
became moot, because the anarchist moment was brief. Especially after Roe v.
Wade made it seem strategically wise to rely on government power, the women’s
movement was to take off in a decisively liberal direction, and to rely increasingly
on organizational forms that were anything but egalitarian. But, for those still
working in egalitarian collectives, or trying to create them, feminism had effectively
framed the terms of debate. If you want to keep decision making to the
smallest groups possible, how do those groups coordinate? Within those groups,
how to prevent a clique of friends from taking over? How to prevent certain categories
of participants (straight women, gay women, older women, students—in
mixed groups it soon became, simply, women) from being marginalized? What’s
more, even if mainstream feminists had abandoned the politics of direct action,
there were plenty of radical feminists, not to mention anarchafeminists, around
to try to keep such groups honest.

The origins of the current direct-action movement go back precisely to attempts
to resolve those dilemmas. The pieces really started coming together
in the antinuclear movement of the late 1970s, first with the founding of the
Clamshell Alliance and the occupation of the Shoreham nuclear power plant
in Massachusetts in 1977, then followed by the Abalone Alliance and struggles
over the Diablo Canyon plant in California a few years later. The main inspiration
for antinuclear activists—at least on questions of organization—were ideas
propounded by a group called the Movement for a New Society (MNS), based in
Philadelphia. MNS was spearheaded by a gay rights activist named George Lakey,
who—like several other members of the group—was also an anarchist Quaker.

Lakey and his friends proposed a vision of nonviolent revolution. Rather than a
cataclysmic seizure of power, they proposed the continual creation and elaboration
of new institutions, based on new, non-alienating modes of interaction—
institutions that could be considered “prefigurative” insofar as they provided a
foretaste of what a truly democratic society might be like. Such prefigurative institutions
could gradually replace the existing social order (Lakey 1973). The vision
in itself was hardly new. It was a nonviolent version of the standard anarchist
idea of building a new society within the shell of the old. What was new was that
men like Lakey, having been brought up Quakers, and acquired a great deal of
experience with Quaker decision-making processes, had a practical vision of how
some of these alternatives might actually work. Many of what have now become
standard features of formal consensus process—the principle that the facilitator
should never act as an interested party in the debate, the idea of the “block”—
were first disseminated by MNS trainings in Philadelphia and Boston.

The antinuclear movement was also the first to make its basic organizational
unit the affinity group—a kind of minimal unit of organization first developed
by anarchists in early twentieth-century Spain and Latin America—and
spokescouncils. As Starhawk pointed out in Chapter 1, all this was very much
a learning process, a kind of blind experiment, and things were often extremely
rocky. At first, organizers were such consensus purists that they insisted that any
one individual had the right to block proposals even on a nationwide level, which
proved entirely unworkable. Still, direct action proved spectacularly successful in
putting the issue of nuclear power on the map. If anything, the movement fell
victim to its own success. Though it rarely won a battle—that is, for a blockade
to prevent the construction of any particular new plant—it very quickly won the
war. US government plans to build a hundred new generators were scotched after
a couple years and no new plans to build nuclear plants have been announced
since. Attempts to move from nuclear plants to nuclear missiles and, from there,
to a social revolution, however, proved more of a challenge, and the movement itself
was never able to jump from the nuclear issue to become the basis of a broader
revolutionary campaign. After the early 1980s, it largely disappeared.

This is not to say nothing was going on in the late 1980s and 1990s. Radical
AIDS activists working with ACT UP, and radical environmentalists with groups
like Earth First!, kept these techniques alive and developed them. In the 1990s,
there was an effort to create a North American anarchist federation around a
newspaper called Love & Rage that, at its peak, involved hundreds of activists
in different cities. Still, it’s probably accurate to see this period less as an era of
grand mobilizations than as one of molecular dissemination. A typical example
is the story of Food Not Bombs, a group originally founded by a few friends from
Boston who had been part of an affinity group providing food during the actions
at Shoreham. In the early 1980s veterans of the affinity group set up shop in a
squatted house in Boston and began dumpster-diving fresh produce cast off by
supermarkets and restaurants, and preparing free vegetarian meals to distribute
in public places. After a few years, one of the founding members moved to San
Francisco and set up a similar operation there. Word spread (in part because of
some dramatic, televised arrests) and, by the mid-1990s autonomous chapters of
FNB were appearing all over America, and Canada as well. By the turn of the
millennium, there were literally hundreds. But Food Not Bombs is not an organization.
There is no overarching structure, no membership or annual meetings.

It’s just an idea—that food should go to those that need it, and in a way that those
fed can themselves become part of the process if they want to—plus some basic
how-to information (now easily available on the Internet), and a shared commitment
to egalitarian decision-making and a do-it-yourself (DIY) spirit. Gradually,
cooperatives, anarchist infoshops, clinic defense groups, Anarchist Black Cross
prisoner collectives, pirate radio collectives, squats, and chapters of Anti-Racist
Action began springing up on a similar molecular basis across the continent. All
became workshops for the creation of direct democracy. But, especially since so
much of it developed not on campuses, but within countercultural milieus like
the punk scene, it remained well below the radar of not only the corporate media,
but even of standard progressive journals like Mother Jones or the Nation. This, in
turn, explains how, when such groups suddenly began to coalesce and coordinate
in Seattle, it seemed, for the rest of the country, as if a movement had suddenly
appeared from nowhere.

By the time we get to Seattle, though, it’s impossible to even pretend such
matters can be discussed within a national framework. What the press insists
on calling the “anti-globalization movement” was, from the very beginning, a
self-consciously global movement. The actions against the WTO Ministerial in
Seattle were first proposed by PGA, a planetary network that came into being
by the initiative of the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. The emphasis on the WTO
reflected the concerns of farmer’s groups in India and the tactics employed could
equally well be seen as an amalgam of ideas drawn mainly from the Global South
than as an indigenous American development. It was the Internet, above all,
that made this possible. If nothing else, the Internet has allowed for a qualitative
leap in the range and speed of molecular dissemination: there are now Food
Not Bombs chapters, for instance, in Caracas and Bandung. The year or two directly
after Seattle also saw the emergence of the network of Independent Media
Centers, radical web journalism that has completely transformed the possibilities
of information flow about actions and events. Activists who used to struggle for
months and years to put on actions that were then entirely ignored by the media
now know that anything they do will be picked up and reported instantly in photos,
stories, and videos, across the planet—if only in a form accessed largely by
other activists. The great problem has been how to translate the flow of information
into structures of collective decision making—since decision making is the
one thing that is almost impossible to do on the Internet. Or, more precisely, the
question is: when and on what level are structures of collective decision making
required? The Direct Action Network, and the Continental DAN structure that
began to be set up in the months following Seattle, was a first effort to address
this problem. Ultimately it foundered. In doing so, however, it also played a key
role in disseminating certain models of direct democracy, and making their practice
pretty much inextricable from the idea of direct action. It’s the conjunction
between these two phenomenon, now pretty much irreversibly established in the
most radical social movements in America and, increasingly, elsewhere, that’s the
real subject of this book."

==On activist lifestyles==

David Graeber, chapter 6:

"If one sees capitalism as a gigantic meaningless engine of endless expansion
that reduces the majority of the planet’s inhabitants to hopeless poverty, that
reduces even its beneficiaries to lonely isolated atoms doomed by fear and insecurity
to lives of mind-numbing work and meaningless consumerism, even as it
threatens the destruction of the planet—but if at the same time, one does not
wish to, or does not believe it possible to simply flee the system, but rather wishes
to stay and fight—then what precisely can one do? What sort of social relations
is it possible to create among those who wish to make their lives a refusal of the
very logic of capitalism, even as they necessarily remain inside it?

The logic of bohemian life has always been an attempt to answer this. It has
always tended towards both the cultivation of adventure, danger, and extreme
forms of experience, but at the same time, of relations of mutual aid and trust
between those pursuing it—even, often, those who might otherwise be strangers.
This is precisely the sensibility one encounters in direct actions too.

Consider again the idea of a mosh pit, in which dancers hurl themselves into
one another, or stage-dive into the crowd. It’s a matter of both creating dangerous,
even violent situations, but at the same time, placing an almost blind faith
in surrounding strangers—for help and support—since, after all, if they did not
catch or buffer you, you might well end up with a broken neck. In principle, the
logic of play aggression and ultimate trust has much in common with the sadomasochism
that is constantly alluded to (though rarely practiced) in the punk
aesthetic. It’s the kind of pleasure that arises from adventure: excitement, unpredictability,
faith, and reliance on one’s companions—which can only be real with
the endless possibility of betrayal. At the same time, though, it is anything but an
ethos of machismo.

Obviously, all of this varies from one subculture to another. For many years at
ABC No Rio, an anarchist social center in the Lower East Side, there was—aside
from the usual zine magazine, computers, and the like— a weight room used by
members of a group called RASH, the “Red Anarchist Skinheads.” But subcultural
groups are always defining themselves against one another.
The play of desire and mutual dependence reappears on all sorts of subtle
levels.

The one theme that recurs endlessly in all of this is “autonomy”: simultaneously
the greatest anarchist value, and the greatest dilemma. Certain forms of
autonomy—the isolated individualism of mainstream American society, with its
solitary pleasures—are precisely that against which one is rebelling. Or, perhaps,
one might say, the question is how to balance autonomy, solidarity, and freedom.
Cornelius Castoriadis (1987, 1991), for example, defined “autonomy” as the ability
of a community to live only under rules they had themselves collectively created,
and had the right to reexamine constantly. For many anarchists, freedom
appears to mean the ability to create new communities, and ties of mutual dependence,
more or less on the spot, and to move back and forth between them as one
wishes. An action, a party, a picnic, a dance, can all be temporary autonomous
zones where desires coalesce and the leap of faith involved in trusting strangers
itself becomes a large part of the adventure—even when police are not present,
which, as we shall see, is rarely, since police have a notable tendency to show up
whenever anarchists get together. The dilemmas, though, become much more
acute when attempts are made—as they regularly are—to turn TAZs into PAZs,
to move from temporary to more permanent zones of autonomy.

In the next section then let me talk a little about more permanent activist
spaces. As we’ll see, these are almost never quite, entirely, permanent. Every space
has to be, to some degree, conquered, and most are almost instantly besieged.


'''Activist Landscapes: Community Gardens'''

The community gardens were a prime example. The Guiliani administration,
on coming to office in 1994, almost immediately launched a broad offensive
against the whole network of community gardens, redefining them as vacant
lots and introducing a plan to auction off 741 of them throughout the city for
the development of “affordable housing.” (In one weekly radio address, Guiliani
made it clear this was an attack on the very principle of common property: “This
is a free-market economy,” he said. “The age of Communism is over.”) A prolonged
struggle ensued, peaking in 1998 and 1999 with numerous direct actions
in which More Gardens! activists locked down in front of bulldozers, as well as
one Reclaim the Streets action that closed down Avenue A for several hours and
another that led to the arrest of sixty-two people at a lockdown on the West Side
Highway. Several gardens were destroyed, but in the end, Guiliani suffered one of
his administration’s few major defeats when a coalition of wealthy patrons intervened
to buy up several of the targeted gardens in order to preserve them—and
the state attorney general shortly thereafter sued the city to prevent any more auctions,
on the grounds that doing so violated the city’s own regulations that there
should be at least two acres of green space for every thousand inhabitants.
This was a great victory, but an activist soon learns that no victory is irreversible.
Also, that every victory tends to be accompanied by terrible, tragic losses.

Another Guiliani target was Charas itself. In fact, destroying it soon seemed to
have become a kind of obsession of his administration. At least, that was how it
seemed to local housing activists. During the entire period of DAN’s existence,
the building was under legal siege. Since its status rested on what was, effectively,
a gentlemen’s agreement with the government—the building being leased from
the government for a dollar a year—it was perfectly legal for Guiliani’s administration
to break the deal and auction it off which it did—at the same auction,
on July 20, 1998, as several of the largest community gardens. The auction itself
has become something of a legend among Lower East Side activists, who used
every means possible to disrupt it, ranging from protests outside, to phony buyers
trying to bid up the price inside, to the release of ten thousand crickets on the
auction house floor—which did manage to clear the house, but only temporarily.

Eventually the title was passed to an anonymous purchaser who—despite the
city’s efforts to protect his identity—was soon revealed to be one Gregg Singer, a
small-time property developer from the Upper West Side. Singer was now technically
the owner of the building (El Bohio), and Charas merely his tenant. He
immediately moved to evict, but this was difficult: his hands were tied by a restricted-
use covenant that allowed the building only to be used for “community
facility use.” As a result, in order to expel Charas, he had to demonstrate that he
had lined up new tenants who were also going to use the building for cultural or
public-service related purposes. The legal problem from his perspective, then—at
least, until a prolonged process of appeals and legal skirmishes was finished—was
to find a legitimate cultural institution willing to lease the building, even if they
knew that doing so would mean evicting a neighborhood community center.

This was almost impossible, but it meant that the entire activist community that
used Charas was subject to instantaneous “Singer alerts”: the new landlord was
obliged to announce visits with prospective tenants three hours in advance, so
Charas would then send a message immediately over activist listservs, as well as
their own phone trees, calling everyone available to dash down to the yard in
front of Charas for an instant demo, grabbing signs left for the purpose in the
Charas lobby, explaining to the visitors—say, the pastor of some Harlem church
needing a space for choir practice, or some charitable group looking for office
space—what was actually going on.

This approach was certainly effective. Singer never did find a legitimate tenant
willing to displace Charas. But eventually he succeeded in driving Charas
out by other means. After a trial in which a jury ruled unanimously in favor of
Charas and against Singer, another judge (who we all assumed must have been
bribed, though, of course, we cannot prove it) voided the results on the grounds
that the matter should never have been brought before a jury to begin with,
and simply handed the property over to Singer. Local squatters were prepared
to launch a major occupation and defense—arguing that every building given
up without a fight emboldens the city to move on another one—but the Charas
people ended up vetoing the plan, on the grounds that, as a community organization,
their only chance of acquiring another space depended on maintaining
some kind of relations with the city, and that a pitched battle would certainly
make this impossible. Therefore, after a (largely ceremonial) lockdown, the building
was boarded up, and—at time of writing five years later—remains empty,
since its new landlord has still been unable to find anyone willing to rent it, and
has not yet acquired legal authorization to tear it down. Charas, the organization,
remains homeless.

That same precariousness, incidentally, is felt around other activist institutions
as well. Pirate radio stations are spaces won from the FCC; they tend to be
shut down. Even Pacifica, the most friendly media outlet, was under continual
peril after the “Christmas coup” at the very end of 2000, when it was effectively
taken over by a pro-corporate faction. Many members were purged and banned,
and the remaining radicals mostly marginalized. It took two years of continual
mobilization, direct action, lobbying, and propaganda to finally restore it to its
original board. All free or even semi-free territory has to be defended. One result
is to reinforce the somewhat untidy, impromptu feel of all the spaces. Everything
is slightly unfinished, or in process of construction. It’s partly an aesthetic, as
we’ll see; but it’s partly also because almost everything in such spaces is in the
process of either being captured or taken away.

Colin Campbell (1987) once suggested that one reason bohemians have always
hated the bourgeoisie is that the former see themselves as people who have
abandoned comforts for the pursuit of pleasure, whereas the bourgeoisie are people
who have done exactly the opposite. However glib, there is a kind of truth
here. Campbell also argues that bohemians are, effectively, the avant-garde of
consumerism, exploring new forms of pleasure that can be commodified in the
next generation, and here I think he misses the point. The point is that this pleasure
is, specifically, at the point of creation: the pleasure of destroying the very
boundaries that categories like production and consumption create. Pleasure in
production is never comfortable. But it often can feel all the more thrilling for
that fact.

Government regulations essentially enforce a certain model of society,
in which individual actors or hierarchically organized companies seek profits,
and anyone who wishes to organize themselves differently—around any sort of
conception of common good—needs to either be part of the state apparatus, or to
register with it as a nonprofit corporation. In theory, every aspect of “civil society”
is so regulated. Basically, the only areas that are entirely off-limits to this sort of
regulation backed by force are communicative ones: speech, discussion in meetings,
exchanges on the Internet, etc.22 As soon as one enters the world of material
objects, regulations abound. And the larger, heavier, and more visible the objects,
the more those regulations tend to be enforced. The obvious result is to leave people
with the feeling that radical politics is unrealistic. It’s all an ephemeral dreamworld
that melts away the moment it hits material reality. As soon as it enters the
“real world,” the world of large heavy things like buildings and machinery and so
on, it all seems to be proved unrealistic. In fact, this is really just because heavy
physical objects are so much easier to regulate. As a result, large, heavy, valuable
objects tend to be surrounded by threats of physical force that back up a certain
ideology of how people are expected to interact, and if they don’t, they tend to
be taken away from you. The objects that seem the most self-evidently real are in
fact those most surrounded by forces and abstractions.

To anticipate an argument I will make in the conclusion: consider for a moment
some of the uses of the word “real.” One can speak of the forms of property
that are easiest to regulate—the largest, the hardest to hide, therefore, the most
effectively surrounded by the threat of violence—as “real estate,” “real property”
as opposed to movables. Note that “real” property is in no sense more empirically
real than movables: in fact, insofar as it involves complex abstractions like
air rights, one might say that compared with, say, a tomato, it is decided less so.23
But one can also talk about “realpolitik,” or political “realism.” In international
relations, for instance, to be “Realist” (as opposed to an “Institutionalist”) means
proceeding from the assumption that nations will not hesitate to use force in
pursuit of their own national interests. Once again, this has nothing to do with
recognizing what we like to think of as empirical reality: “nations” with collective
“interests” are purely imaginary constructs. They become “real” when they
threaten to send in the army. The “reality” one recognizes when one is being a “realist”
is purely that of violence. Yet it’s precisely that collapse of the effects of violence
into the very apparent solidity of the object that produces the reality effect
I’m talking about, and makes social alternatives seem so unrealistic. Abstractions
like law and the state attach themselves, by threat of force, particularly to the
largest, heaviest objects—the things that seem most empirically “real.”

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