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PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED

Punk was "more than music," it was also a social movement. "DIY and nonviolent direct action (NVDA) feed off each other," writes cultural historian George McKay. "NVDA is the preferred form of politics."(55) Yet even the self-proclaimed super-activists have trouble defining or explaining a movement based on far-flung networks of individuals and informal communities of interest. The American underground was a rare phenomenon: a closely-knit community made up of radical individualists.

Barbara Epstein, an expert on the New Social Movements, explains:

The nonviolent direction action movement has been hard to delineate. Its organizations have not been formally linked in any way; the movement has been internally diverse, and has overlapped many other movements and communities.(56)

Epstein's words are echoed by those of journalist Mary Losure. Losure spent two years reporting on a coalition of anti-road protesters. The protesters, an uneasy alliance of Dakota tribal members and traveling eco-anarchists, had set up a permanent encampment in south Minneapolis (the "Minnehaha Free State"). Losure writes:

The people at the Minnehaha Free State sometimes called it 'the resistance,' but even they found it hard to describe, and they didn't like labels anyway. It's not an organization, or even a movement they said. It has no official leaders or spokespersons, and no membership rolls. But its followers tend to share certain core beliefs.(57)

These beliefs include an emphasis on lived experience and action over theory, what Stephen Duncombe has referred to as a kind of "nonviolent propaganda of the deed." Theirs was a pre-figurative revolution-a "threat by example"-an attempt to live as if the revolution had already taken place.

Stephen Duncombe:

There was an anarchist principle in the late-Nineteenth Century called 'propaganda of the deed.' It was really this notion that one had to act in the world; one had to produce in the world -that it wasn't enough to talk about it. It wasn't even enough to strategize about how we will get there-eventually-which is what the socialists were doing. Propaganda of the deed was this idea that you would, in Christian parlance, 'bear witness' to the change that you wanted in the world. Or bear witness to the violence that you saw in the world. The point is that you would almost reproduce it, and represent it yourself.

Such thinking mirrored early punk fashion trends, where young people altered their physical appearance, becoming the living embodiment of all the violence and ugliness in the world.

Mark Anderson:

It's such a rush of power and righteous outrage that punk rock represents. And I know that that was part of why I loved it -just this roar of anger and pain.

There was a certain tension inherent in punk politics, resulting from conflicting visions of DIY: communitarianism vs. radical individualism. Punk was predicated on a belief that there were "no rock stars," that everyone was equal, that the personal was political -and that way you in which you conduct your business was supposed to reflect the values of the (punk) community as a whole (no price-gouging, no autographs),(58) even to the point of not signing record contracts (Touch and Go Records was famous for splitting the profits 50-50, based entirely on handshake deals). At the same time, the Do-It-Yourself ideology reflected an underlying belief that that real change could only come as the result of a small, but determined minority ("Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has..."). There is an element of truth to this, especially in the cultural realm. As recently as 1989, hip-hop wasn't considered proper music; today it is the dominant musical style throughout the world.

Punk was simultaneously elitist and egalitarian, small 'd' democratic and deeply suspicious of the majority.(59) Political gestures often took the form of acts of refusal or withdrawal, retreating into utopian communities and subcultural ghettos (what sociologists have labeled avoidance lifestyles).(60)

Mark Anderson:

That's partly because most of us in the punk community-at least at the outset-are attracted to it because we feel like we're outsiders, and that we aren't like the mainstream or the majority, and that we're put down as a result. And that tends to make us withdraw and create our own subculture or counter-culture. And all of that's really important, in what I call subjective terms. That is, what's happening internally... However, if punk (and each of us as persons) stays at that level of development, then we're really not going to be able to contribute significantly to overall transformation.

Others would disagree. In his influential essay T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone), author Hakim Bey (a pseudonym for religious scholar Peter Lamborn Wilson) embraces avoidance and disappearance as a tactical goal:

Why bother to confront a [governmental] "power" which has lost all meaning and become sheer Simulation? Such confrontations will only result in dangerous and ugly spasms of violence by the emptyheaded shit-for-brains who've inherited the keys to all the armories and prisons... As I read it, disappearance seems to be a very logical radical option for our time, not at all a disaster or death for the radical project.(61)

BIG A, LITTLE A

So what is DIY? Hakim Bey has described this "vast and ambiguous" collection of "clandestine" networks as a Web: "a support system, capable of carrying information from one [Temporary Autonomous Zone] to another... But more than that: If the TAZ is a nomad camp, the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies, and legends of the tribe..." (62) This idea of cultural outposts connected by the threads of a massive spider web should not be confused with the Internet. Hakim Bey was writing about "the Web" back in 1985 --the World Wide Web did not exist yet. (The first Web browser was invented in 1991, and wasn't made available to the general public until 1993.)

Moreover, Bey explicitly rejects the notion that "the Web" is related to computers:

The Web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. Word-of-mouth, mail, the marginal zine network, 'phone trees,' and the like already suffice to construct an information network.(63)

Viewed in this light, DIY serves as an historian, a shaman, an exoskeleton, and a safety net.

Is it anarchism? Not necessarily.

Ollie Stench:

I've never really been that politically motivated, because I'm one of those people who thinks it's all corrupt. The extreme Left is as bad as the extreme Right.

Nevertheless, the Do-It-Yourself ethic includes a kind of instinctive, or "unconscious" tendency towards anarchism. The publishers of Universe of Truancy weren't necessarily anarchists with a capital "A" (and the editors of Wrestling Perspective almost certainly were not), but the freewheeling structure of the zine scene was very anarchistic in actual practice, being made up of decentralized (and autonomous) communities of interest.

Again, there are positive parallels: "networking" as an alternative to politics is practiced at many levels of society, and non-hierarchic organization has attained popularity even outside the anarchist movement, simply because it works. (ACT UP and Earth First! are two examples. Alcoholics Anonymous, oddly enough, is another.)(64)

- Hakim Bey

Stephen Duncombe:

I think [anarchism] became the de facto ideology of the zine world because there was such a resonance between the two. There's no doubt about that. The idea that one could be an individual and have individual liberty, but within a larger collective project is exactly what anarchism is about.

Mark Anderson:

I don't know if I would say that most of punk politics is centered around it... I do think that that anarchism-or anarchy-is a natural starting place that a lot of punks will be at. It's this radical outcry against oppression. And a radical cry for freedom -largely for personal freedom. And that's not a bad thing... But I definitely feel that people ultimately come to understand that freedom can't exist without accepting responsibility. Freedom will whither and die. To this day, I have no argument with the version of anarchism that demands both the freedom and the responsibility.

I will say that much of what passes for anarchism in punk circles seems caught not much past the level that the Sex Pistols annunciated nearly three decades ago. And that's unfortunate.

CULTURAL OUTPUT AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR POLITICS

Alternative culture is not the same as activism, yet within the realm of DIY, cultural output often functioned as a substitute for politics. There is nothing inherently radical about record collecting-or community theater for that matter-nor are political manifestos likely to nourish a sense of kinship or personal affinity.

There's a reason why the major accomplishments of the Left for the last 30 years have primarily been within the realm of popular culture. Putting ink to paper or composing a piece of music is a lot easier than coming up with actual solutions to complex political and social problems. This is not to say that culture is not important: culture is one of the most powerful means of shaping human behavior. (Where would the Civil Rights movement have been without the Freedom Singers?) But there's a big difference between singing about social inequality (ala Rage Against the Machine), and actually establishing a free clinic for people without access to health proper health care.

The two tendencies are not so easy to separate. Art becomes the bridge between the personal and the political. When it comes to community-building, one should not underestimate the importance of ritual. Consider the annual Mayday Parade and Festival, a celebration of the "Red" and "Green" roots of Mayday (the labor movement and spring fertility rituals), using stilt walkers and giant puppets, that draws 50,000 people annually to Minneapolis' Powderhorn Park. Many locals brag of having "never missed a Mayday Parade" for 20 (or 30) years. Through public workshops, and participatory democracy, the parade has done more to politicize the local populace than the Democratic Party ever will.

Stephen Duncombe:

Probably the most important thing [about alternative culture], and this mostly came from zines, is that politics can be fun, that politics can be creative. Politics did not have to be about sacrifice and tamping-down your message. Politics did not have to be about being serious "'cause there's serious issues in the world." Politics could be expressive. And politics could generate models in which each individual's expression had room.

This could lead to some confusion. In 1989, the Minneapolis arts journal Artpaper ran a full-page article on "Without Borders," an anarchist gathering in San Francisco. Readers looking for gallery listings and grant opportunities wondered what anarchists rioting in Berkeley had to do with the visual arts.

Whitney Clark, a former volunteer at Back Room Anarchist Books explains.

Whitney Clark:

There was that whole cultural thing, which is sometimes difficult to disentangle from the core activists.

Though they ran in the same social circles, the cultural anarchists had a different disposition.

Whitney Clark:

It wasn't about activism. It was more modest.

Mark Anderson:

I think one of the great things about punk is that it has been a meeting ground for art and politics.

For Anderson, the importance of DIY culture is the people-centered nature of the movement; DIY is politics on a human scale.

Mark Anderson:

If we can keep the spirit of that, and not get so hung up on the form, that's exactly what we need!

However, there is also an inherent limit, it seems to me, as to how far that can go unless we're willing to take the next step. And that's connecting what I call the authentic 'Me' with the revolutionary 'We.'

Critics have called this "lifestyle anarchism," a term coined by the anarchist theoretician Murray Bookchin. For many (particularly within the white anarcho-punk scene), simply being a "punk" had become a goal unto itself, a kind of subcultural identity politics, even going so far as to suggest that "punks" are an oppressed minority (and not simply people who have freely chosen to wear ridiculous clothing and outrageous hairstyles).

There's nothing like wearing your politics on your sleeve. I can assure you that the degrading remarks, harassment and brutality such an outward appearance invokes can be in many ways as hardening on the soul as growing up Black, Latino or Hispanic in the society where straight white culture is holding the whip... You can try to tell me that it's all a fashion clique, but it's not. For most of us, there's no going back. We left our bourgeois upbringing and white privileges behind.(65)

- Dan Siskind, Profane Existence

Writing in the nationwide info-shop newspaper (Dis)connection, Brian Dominick observes that there are three main problems with contemporary anarchism:

First of all, it is identified with a certain, relatively homogenous cultural milieu -most of those who rear their heads at anarchist 'movement' events are roughly between 16-30 years old, with background influences of 'punk' or other 'alternative' persuasions. Second, anarchism is identified with premature, spontaneous insurrection, which is frightening and off-putting to most people. Finally, the current anarchist movement... is not very relevant to the lives of most oppressed people... We can't blame the media or pop culture for this, except where we've let them define us in our own eyes.(66)

Stephen Duncombe:

Why has anarchism become the de facto ideology of the larger group? I think it partly has to do with people who grow up in a culture which encourages/stimulates/guarantees individual expression -and then they find out that that capitalism isn't really about individual expression. And so, they're looking for an ideology that speaks to the culture that they've been brought up in, and that speaks against the reality that's been offered to them.

The other thing is that socialism did not work... And the Soviet Union obviously did not work. This is a generation that really came of age with the falling of Berlin Wall.

Mimi Nguyen:

Why anarchism? I think it's the flexibility of the idea, and it's ability to encompass so many different things, while still maintaining the idea that anarchism is really against the State. But what does that mean? What does that break down to? What does that look like? It's that flexibility that makes it possible for anarchism to continue to sustain interest.

I also think that the downfall of the sectarian communist groups is that there's no working model left... The anarchists have the benefit of never having had an anarchist society that failed (besides Spain in 1936, which they all blame on Franco and communists anyways). So they've never had an opportunity to see how such a society would actually work, and that continues to fuel their debates.

THE YOUNG CONVERT

The term "anarchist" was a slippery one, because many, probably most [within the movement] defined themselves as anarchists. The rejection of hierarchy, the espousal of the consensus process, the affinity group structure, spokes and spokescouncils, were all regarded as coming directly or indirectly from an anarchist tradition.(67)

- Barbara Epstein

By 1999, Anarchism had become the defacto ideology of the "New-New Left." Yet even within the direct action movement, there were often deep divisions between pacifist-anarchists (a group that also included many feminists and religious people who'd done serious prison time),(68) and so-called "revolutionary anarchists" who "put themselves forward as representing militancy against what they regarded as prevailing timidity."(69)

This was especially true during the WTO protests in Seattle. While the "black bloc" stole the headlines, it was groups such as the Direction Action Network that took the initiative in planning the event. Though few-if any-of the 50,000 union members and environmentalists who took part in the demonstrations would have identified themselves as "anarchists," the entire blockade was organized according to anarchist principles. There were no "leaders" -except for those that the media tried to appoint. Decisions were made in accordance with a grassroots, democratic model. Lockdowns were carried out by small groups of acquaintances-affinity groups-that sent representatives (or "spokespersons") to a larger "spokescouncil." But the anarchist process was the ultimate loser that day. After braving tear gas, rubber bullets, and riot batons, the disciplined actions of the protesters who shut down the WTO wound up being completely overshadowed by a couple of guys in ski masks who were high on testosterone.

An agreement was in place between the loosely knit group of West Coast anarchists that "organized" for the WTO and the Direct Action Network to respect the nonviolence code downtown during the day of November 30. I don't consider property destruction violent in and of itself-I consider property violent, actually-but that's beside the point. November 30th's shutdown of the WTO was designed as a protest that a broad cross section of our society could support -and that meant no property destruction.(70)

- Geov Parrish, Seattle Weekly

The issue wasn't the broken windows --the Plowshares protesters had been sabotaging nuclear weapons plants for decades-- it was the fact that a handful of anarcho-primitivists(71) had decided to hijack the demonstration, providing cover for the police (who used the "violence" to justify the beating of unarmed protesters and hundreds of local residents).

After that long, collaborative and democratic process, a small number of protesters who had ignored, boycotted, or repudiated this movement's process took it upon themselves to break the sense of solidarity and collective cohesion reached by scores of organizations and thousands of individuals... They apparently believe that they represent an elite that knows what's best for people, and which can ignore the decisions of coalitions... Whatever they call themselves, this is elitist, anti-democratic and anti-movement behavior.(72)

- Medea Benjamin

Needless to say, the cost of repairing the windows at Starbucks pales in comparison to the economic damage wrought by corporate fraud at Enron, where 4,000 employees lost their pensions.

Lorelei Juntunen:

There was a lot of potential there... ultimately, I don't think that a lot of good came out of it.

Because of the police intervention, and because of the violence, and because of the way the media portrayed it, the protesters were sort of marginalized, and their message never really got out. And the fusion of all these different causes coming together -I haven't really seen anything like it since then. And I think part of it might be because those protests got so out-of-hand.

Throughout its 150-year history, anarchism has placed a much greater emphasis on self-expression than political efficacy. As members of a revolutionary vanguard, the "black block anarchists" (with a capital "A") had little time for direct democracy (sometimes referred to as "the Quaker process," "the feminist process," or "consensus-based decision making"); they were much more interested in spontaneous-and isolated-acts of rebellion.

This was the historical legacy of propaganda of the deed: symbolic, mostly futile gestures at the expense of real political organizing. The failure of such tactics in the late-nineteenth century led the anarchist writer Alexander Berkman to conclude:

Many Anarchists who at one time believed in violence as a means of propaganda have changed their opinion about it and do not favor such methods any more... Most Anarchists today do not believe any more in "propaganda by deed" and do not favor acts of that nature. Experience has taught them that though such methods may have been justified and useful in the past, modern conditions of life make them unnecessary and even harmful to the spread of their ideas.

Berkman was speaking from personal experience: in 1892, he tried to assassinate the Homestead steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, touching off a political backlash against union organizers. Several of Berkman's comrades-in-arms (along with 17 residents of a New York tenement building) were later blown apart when a bomb intended for John D. Rockefeller Jr. went off prematurely in their apartment.(73)

LEAVING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Stephen Duncombe:

I thought that [DIY culture] was going to have an immense impact -up until 9/11. The anti-corporate globalization movement was really infused with that counter-cultural/alternative cultural feel. The big demonstrations were carnivals, if nothing else. And the question there was actually: "How do we stabilize some of this?" And that conversation was just beginning to happen: the whole name "Another World Is Possible" was really an acknowledgement that we had to move to someplace else. And then it got literally hijacked by 9/11.

Unfortunately, I think what's happened with the direness of the war in Iraq (and also the repression that comes around anti-terrorism), is that politics has really fallen back into its instinctual, boring mode... So now what we have is fairly established organizations who do really important work-that at its best actually engages with power-but it doesn't have much of an alternative cultural feel. And I don't know what will happen to that alternative cultural moment of the 1990's, whether it's gone forever, or whether it will resurge at another time. I just don't know.

Gordon Edgar:

At one point, somebody asked me to work on some anarchist magazine, and I just wasn't... I just don't care enough anymore. My goal is not to move forward "the anarchist movement," my goal is to move forward as people. And I don't think that's best served at this point by making a really alienating anarchist magazine. (Even if I would agree with most of the things they had to say.)