Ann Hansen author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla
Ann Hansen was a member of the Squamish 5 AKA the Direct Action 5 from Vancouver. In the 1980’s they engaged in robberies, bombings, firebombing and other acts of violence against property. In one action a bombing of a Litton plant in Ontario ten workers were seriously injured. The group was eventually arrested and imprisoned. Ann has recently published a book defending their actions, she is currently on tour across Canada promoting her book and her ideas around armed struggle and urban guerrilla warfare to anti-capitalist and anti-globalization activists.
"I am certainly not opposed to peaceful protest. Yet, I also believe that to make real social change people and movements must be prepared to go beyond. In some cases that means so-called political violence. We didn't see ourselves as terrorists. I prefer the term sabotage because that implies a strategic action, with references to economic issues, and not simply a violent reaction or lashing out in frustration. I don't agree with terrorism as a political tactic because it is morally wrong to punish the innocent for the crimes of their leaders. And it's not politically effective because fear does not enlighten people, but instead will often drive them to support even more reactionary actions by their leaders."
Ann Hansen, author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, in conversation with Peter Steven, 2001
Ann Hansen and the Direct Action / Squamish 5 group out of Vancouver never were anarchists. They are and were armed struggle advocates, influenced by Maoism and third worldism more than by the philosophy of socialist anarchism.
Their infantile actions, during the mass movement against the cruise missile, resulted in the bombing of the Litton factory and the injuring of ten waged workers. Litton had been the focus of the anti-nuke/anti-cruise movement because they produced cruise missile guidance systems, systems that had been developed at Simon Fraser University by a resident professor. The cruise guidance systems were developed in Canada and tested here because our geography and terrain is similar to Northern Russia.
The idiocy of the Squamish Five, also known as the Direct Action 5, was their complete isolation from the mass movements, which they impacted on with their bombings.
Its as if the lessons we learned over a century ago that the Politics of Dynamite[1] were a failure. The Haymarket riot, the French Anarchist bombings and robberies in the 19th Century, and of course the ill fated stupidity of, Alexander Berkmans attempt to assassinate Frick, came back to haunt our movement in the form of this little band of adventurers.
They and their ilk have mistaken direct action for attacks on property. They are divorced from the struggle for building mass movements. This same mistaken ideology, that anarchism equates with violent actions like street fighting, sabotage, bombings, window breaking, looting, is reflected in the misanthropic politics of some Animal Rights Activists and the Black Bloc.
In Edmonton in the 1990's the self styled anarchist/direct action Animal Liberation Front managed to firebomb a truck load of Lobsters at Billingsgate Foods, in an effort to liberate these poor souls from their ultimate demise on a dinner plate. Instead they cooked these victims of speciest oppression. Other acts of violence against property the ALF in Edmonton took were equally stupid and resulted in an increase of police repression against the movements they were involved in and their ultimate capture and imprisonment.
Having not learned their lesson several members of the Edmonton ALF were released from jail only to be implicated by the police in sending mail bombs to neo-fascist Ernest Zundel as well as BC Bear Hunters and their hunting associations. Sheesh some people never learn; you can't just blow up a social relationship....you need mass mobilization of people to change the structure of society.
Young liberals, who mistakenly believe they are anarchists, embrace the actions of Ann Hansen and her pals. In reality they are infantile leftists, literally as well as figuratively. This infantilist form of liberalism, mistakenly equated with anarchism, was reflected in the politics of Love and Rage group, as well as the Black Block and CLAC.
The members of the Squamish 5 were the product not of classical anarchism but of the New Left the theories of the Weathermen, Maoism, the idea of vanguardism reeked through their thought and actions. Not believing workers and the masses are intelligent enough to resist capitalism they sought to replace mass action with their "direct" actions of firebombing, and blowing up hydro lines. With little care for how this impacted on the struggles that they embraced.
“That we believed we could create a revolution ourselves. On the contrary, our aims were always more modest--to jolt activists into seeing the seriousness of the issues, and to hope that our radical actions might spark a new militancy. During our trial and afterwards we were looked at with a magnifying glass, but there was no serious discussion about the need for, and effectiveness of, our strategies.”
Ann Hansen, author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, in conversation with Peter Steven, 2001
Class War is the continuous struggle of waged and unwaged proletarians struggling against capitalism and its state, it is not an armed struggle of small bands of individuals. The fetish for so called “direct action” bombing, smashing property, fighting with the cops, etc. is closer to the actions of fascist movements, and in fact there is no difference between the direct action of liberals when they engage in bombing from the actions of fascists[2] who do the same thing.
Whether blowing up or smashing property is done by misdirected liberals or by fascists it always leads to police and state repression of mass movements and activists. The underlying ideology developed in the sixties and seventies was that such repression was good (sic) as it would force the working class to wake up and embrace the struggle. Such cynicism in those so young. Such worldly knowledge divorced from reality, such disdain for the dull monotonous day to day struggles working class folks have to face.
Of course such disdain comes easily when you live in a dope smoking, lifestylist commune. Building the new society within the shell of the old.... divorced from the reality of the single mother working to feed her kids, divorced from the reality of the hydro worker, or even the Litton workers you injured. And let’s understand that Ann and her pals for all their apologetics, are thugs. Litton did not stop production of cruise missile parts, all that happened was that workers, those oppressed and exploited by capitalism, were injured by their self appointed revolutionary saviors.
"I'm sorry about some things that happened, but not everything. An underground group was probably not necessary--we should not have been so isolated from the social movements. The bomb we used at the Litton building was too big and we didn't properly assess the police response. We thought that they would take our warning seriously and clear the building. I am very sorry that people were hurt. And yet, there was, and is, huge damage being done by our governments--look at the legacy of the Cruise missile, in the Gulf War, for instance."
Ann Hansen, author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, in conversation with Peter Steven, 2001
To blame the cops, as Ann has in interviews, for not warning Litton, is to absolve oneself of responsibility for ones actions, a truly liberal trait not one of anarchism. Instead of admitting she and her pals in the Squamish 5 fucked up, it’s the cops fault.
Well the cops didn't plant the bomb. And if the Squamish 5 hadn't wanted to blow something up they wouldn't have armed it. Which they did. And 10 workers were injured. They didn't care. Anyone, who works for the Man is as guilty as the Man, is the logic here.
The adventurism of armed struggle was embraced by many who called themselves anarchists. Anarchism was a convenient label, nothing more. It was convenient for Ann and her comrades as it was for the Unabomber. It was and still is an inappropriate one. The politics of the Squamish 5 and other such groups that support armed struggle, like Arm the Spirit, are being promoted as belonging to the milieu of the broad left anti-capitalist movement. Ann is currently peddling her book to this milieu as if she has anything to teach us. In reality they are vanguardists no less than the Leninists they decry. In fact the armed struggle ideology of these vanguardists is by its very nature, secretive and isolated from the real movement, making it more akin to fascism[3] than any form of left wing politics.
"We suffered from all those mistakes, and we also didn't fully think through the consequences. But the most important error was in not realizing that without a revolutionary social movement in place urban guerrilla tactics won't work--there is no continuity. These links between social movements and radical actions are strategic political questions that must be addressed."
Ann Hansen, author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, in conversation with Peter Steven, 2001
Ann now says she has learned her lesson. That armed struggle must occur as part of a mass movement. Oh joy. Again the vanguardist ideology, that these real revolutionaries will lead us dumb masses by their actions, is still underlying her philosophy. Even a superficial reading of Lenin and Trotsky would illuminate these junior Che Guevera's. An armed insurrection of the working class, is not the same as armed struggle of little bands of vanguardists. It is part of a mass rebellion and overthrow of the state during a revolution. This is the difference between the Russian and Spanish Revolutions, where the masses armed themselves and the failure of Che in Bolivia.
What lessons can we learn from Ann and her friends? Nothing. They have nothing to say or teach us. They are not people we should be emulating, unfortunately some self styled anti-authoritarian liberals (interesting they call themselves anti-authoritarian instead of anarchist) still embrace this vanguardist armed struggle philosophy. Ironic because it is an authoritarian vanguardist ideology, that dismisses real class struggle, and real work of building a mass movement, for the instant gratification of making the news.
It is the philosophy of the street fighter and juvenile delinquent. It would be hoped it would be a phase one grew out of, sort of like being a greaser. Yet this form of infantile direct action, repeats itself over and over again in the anarchist milieu. Now we have the Black Bloc advocating the same stupidity as Ann has.
The Squamish 5 should never be confused with Haymarket martyrs. They were not class war political prisoners, since they attempted to replace class struggle with armed struggle.
Unfortunately, history has shown that the politics of street fighting ends up creating just as many Horst Wessels[3] as it does Ann Hansens. There is no difference between them regardless of Ann’s protestations to the contrary.
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[1] “propaganda by deed”: that is, the use of violence as a political weapon and a form of political expression. It was used in Europe and the United States by various anarchists. “In France from 1891-4, Ravachol exploded bombs in the homes of two officials connect with a recent anarchist trial,; he was guillotined in 1892. Valliant was executed for a bomb-explosion in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1893, which killed nobody. Emile Henry threw a bomb in the Cafe Terminus, which , much against his intentions, caused only minor injuries; executed in May 1894. Caserio, a young Italian anarchist, stabbed President Carnot to death in June of the same year.” Victor Serge Memoirs of Revolutionary , Chapter 1 page 42. Oxford Press 1963
[2] Benito Mussolini was educated as a socialist and anarchist. He embraced the direct action of street fighting and the use of revolutionary violence; the politics of the deed. Deserting the socialist cause, he applied the ideology of "politics of the deed" to creating the fascist movement in Italy. “In Italy,in Pagine Libere of 1 January 1911, a young Socialist agitator, Benito Mussolini, was chanting the praises of the anarchist desperadoes” Victor Serge Memoirs of Revolutionary , Chapter 1 page 43. Oxford Press 1963.
[3] Nazi Youth Leader in Berlin’s working class Ghetto who led street fighters against Communists. He was killed early on and became the first Martyr for the Nazis, who created the hymn the Horst Wessel song in memory of him.
Published in Social Anarchism #35 Winter 2002-2003 (edited version),
Any Time Now, On Infoshop with discussion and comments, posted to a variety of email lists and on Indymedia and Resist.ca
Armed Struggle is NOT Class StruggleA Reply to My Critics
RE: Ann Hansen an Infantile Caricature of Anarchism
Of course I used loaded language and sarcasm to confront, what I see as hero worship of an advocate of armed struggle by, those who equate anarchism and direct action with street fighting, bombings, store trashing, shop lifting, and revolution for the hell of it. No demonstration is a success unless the cops attack it seems to be the underlying ideology of these self-declared activists. That my critique of Ann and the Direct Action 5 has upset these folks is to be expected.
When Ann is advertised as A Revolutionary Speaker that is pretentious, she is no revolutionary. She was a provocateur and remains one. We have to ask who benefits from her touring while on parole. By advocating for Armed Struggle, which she still does, to the newly growing anti-capitalist/anti-globalization movement of young activists, the State has effectively set a fox amongst the chickens. If her actions are inspirational to activists, then the State will have succeeded in diverting us from movement building. Someone will be inspired to take up the call of Armed Struggle, in isolation from the rest of the anti-capitalist movement, opening it up to increased police repression and political division. This occurred in the mass movements of the seventies and again in the eighties with the actions of the Weathermen, Symbionese Liberation Army and other provocateurs and promoters of the underground armed struggle. Need we repeat that those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it?
After all the breast beating about my being condescending most commentators still managed to miss the point. Armed Struggle is NOT Direct Action, it is not class struggle, it is not part of movement building, it is isolationist substitionist and vanguardist. It is not a moral question about the uses of violence, it is a political question about strategies and tactics that help promote social revolution.
Those who advocate Armed Struggle, seek to justify their actions as necessary because either larger political and social actions such as demonstrations and strikes have failed, or because of an inbred cynicism that they have the revolutionary practice and vision while the rest of us don’t. It is clearly an authoritarian theory and practice at best and bourgeois individualism at worst.
Some of those who criticized me wanted to challenge me on a factual basis; that no one was killed at Litton. That is true, I had changed it in most sections of my article, referring to the fact that 10 workers were injured. When editing I had failed to remove that one reference. Mea culpa. But 10 wage slaves were harmed, while Litton continued with business as usual and the cruise missiles were tested and eventually used in the Persian Gulf War. So the bombing was not effective, period.
Several writers dismissed these injuries with comments like “it would be far better to bomb the home of a Litton executive or that Simon Fraser University professor who designed cruise missile guidance systems. But I can't feel too much sympathy for the imperialist-country labor aristocrats who make the weapons that kill real proletarians in the oppressed nations.” This commentary, referring to low paid wage slaves in North America as equivalent to the well heeled bosses of unions shows that there is little real concern for workers where we live, while concern is shown for those workers in the newly industrialized world. It is bleeding heart liberalism. And as Stuart Christie once said; a liberal with a gun is still a liberal.
This is exactly the Third Worldism, I referred to in my critique. It permeates the anarchist web sites and chat sections as well as the thinking of many in the anti-globalization movement. It is the mistaken political ideology that workers here are labour aristocrats even if they are janitors or security guards working for corporate capitalism.
That ideology also permeates the environmentalist movement, and was typical of Earth First, and its monkey-wrenching tactic of spiking trees to save them, while disregarding the injuries to forest workers. If the workers got injured, the logic goes, then they deserve it, since they are willing participants in the destruction of the Old Growth forests. In fact it took Judi Bari and the IWW to challenge and change this view, though as we can see there is still many who support this view. Working for the man makes you the man, is liberal politics at its worst.
This ideology has been an abject political failure as the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction (which Ann was involved with) and Red Brigades as well as sections of the Italian Autonomists have proven. The logical conclusion of some autonomists was to attack unionized workers in Italy because they were not as impoverished as other members of the proletariat. Capitalism exploits us all regardless of geography, that is the point of globalization, to expand capitals ability to exploit the whole world, all of its people, its animals and its resources.
I was challenged over the ALF/ELF. They did not have the influence some have credited them for. Rather it was the mass movement against the fur trade that forced Europeans to quit buying furs that had greater influence on the fur industry in Canada. In Edmonton’s case the businesses targeted were local furrier’s, small craftspeople mainly small businessmen. Big businesses like the Hudsons Bay were not targeted as frequently. Many furriers in Edmonton were older well established family businesses, they closed due to retirement, and decreasing business as the anti-fur message became more popular.
The public protests at the stores drew attention to the anti-fur campaign far more effectively than the sabotage of the ALF, which included gluing the locks of the doors and some window damage. Are furs still available, you bet, but the small local furriers have passed on, stepping off the stage of local capitalism. Such is the history of petit-bourgeois, the artisan and small craftsman in the era of monopoly state capitalism. The small craftsman lives between becoming a capitalist or becoming a proletarian, as their business is superceded by history.
In the case of the hunters associations in BC and Ernst Zundel members of the ALF were busted and implicated in both cases as their own testimony on the web indicates. But both the RCMP and CSIS dropped the charges in 2000 after a flubbed five-year investigation. The ALF is not really underground, the cops know who they are, and have targeted them for continual harassment and observation. This is the same as Ann and her comrades, their house was bugged. The cops have extensive documentation on the ALF and its actions. So they will always be a target and thus of limited influence except as agent provocateurs in a larger movement. Knowing this, that the state has identified these activists and is engaged in a campaign against them, we must protest against state sanctioned harassment, but we must also be critical of the stupidity of these folks to continue to give the state grounds for that harassment. There are other tactics that can be used by activists, besides guns, bombs and razor blades in letters. Again these only encourage the States repressive apparatus to act.
It is the mass movement for animal rights, not the ALF, that has influenced the consumer society, and that is what it is; a movement around consumerism. Its impact on production and workers such as farm workers, trappers, etc is limited to shutting those industries down with no alternative work plans. Such is the limitation of liberal environmentalism. The anti-fur movement, as a consumer action, doesn’t give a shit about producers, its purpose is to eliminate fur production. Period. Thinking capitalism cannot adapt to this consumer movement shows the vacuous thinking of the ALF and other animal rights activists. Mistaking this liberal bleeding heart moralist movement of consumers for an anti-capitalist struggle, is the fuzzy thinking of those who would place the struggle for faux fur on par with class struggle.
Another comment made was typical of the foggy liberal thinking that passes off as radical, whether self identified as anarchism or anti-capitalist; “She did not come across at all as putting armed struggle above other tactics. She simply stated that it should be a tool in our toolbox of tactics and that we should try to understand people who use these tactics (worldwide) before we pass judgment upon them.”
There we go armed struggle is just another tool in the toolbox of diverse tactics. Again the liberal cant of “we should understand people who use these tactics.” Yes we should and where appropriate we may defend them but not their actions. Politics is about passing judgement on people’s theories and their actions. Politics is the understanding of those people and their actions and we have a responsibility to critique and challenge them. Regardless of where in the world they live. Again the aura of liberalism; don’t criticize struggles elsewhere because of our privileged position in North America.
Well capitalism is global, has been for the last hundred years. Nationalism and anti-colonial struggles have failed to create socialist societies; at best they have created some nationalized industries and developed a proletariat out of a peasant society. At worst they have been juntas and military dictatorships with a revolutionary rhetoric that belies the real politics practiced. Such is the case of Cuba, which one writer referred to as a successful example of armed struggle. Except Cuba was not a socialist revolution, anarchists and socialist labour activists were jailed and their organizations banned. Gays were persecuted, freedom of speech, and criticism of Castro were restricted. Workers have no autonomous organizations; all unions are state sanctioned.
Yes Cuba has faced an American Imperialist blockade and constant assaults by the neo-fascist Cuban exile community. And yes you can oppose that blockade, and still call for workers revolution in Cuba. Such was the case of the old Soviet Union as well. Cuban troops who fought with the Marxist-Leninist MPLA in Angola were used to protect Shell Oil refineries that had been seized by oil workers during the Angolan revolution. It seems that workers had mistakenly taken to heart the teaching of Marx and Lenin and declared themselves a Soviet, placing the oil refineries under workers control. Again an armed guerrilla war is not a revolution and never will be. As it came to power the MPLA made sure that the oil kept flowing. The role of these armed anti-colonial struggles in the developing world was to transform agrarian peasant economies into modern capitalist economies.
Another comment on my critique was:
“This is another example of white first world privilege. We have the fucking privilege to be passive and sit on out asses unlike people in "developing" and "third world" countries who have to fight every day of their lives. If the state wants to come down on you, then its gonna come down on ya. Not much you can do about that. The reason the state doesn't do much shit to us (Yeah, yeah, yeah they may send in an infiltrator or two, watch you a little bit and shit like that), is because we are not a threat to it. Groups like MOVE, the Black Panters, American Indian Movement, and even the Southern Christian Leadership Center (lead by Martin Luther King Jr.) were a bigger threat to the power. Until you have constant survallience on you or get murdered in your sleep don't complain about "a heavy-handed response from the State" which you nor I know a damn thing about. “
Actually we all do know the heavy-handed response of the State since 9/11. Canada has passed repressive anti-terrorist laws as has most OECD countries, restricting our rights and increasing police powers.
That being said we see the old New Left Third Worldism being exhorted here. White first world privilege, etc. This was tripe in the 1970’s when the Weathermen and Rote Army Fraction used it. Thirty years later it’s still tripe, albeit with the stench of a rotting corpse of a bankrupt political ideology long ago defunct. And here I will point out to my critics that their new found ideology of post modernism, post colonial deconstruction and identity politics all come down to being a rehash of New Left political ideology, from the seventies. Which was when most of the academics professing this ideology were active.
Indeed it is ironic that Third Worldism and liberal guilt still blinds radicals in North America to the fact that since the 1950’s the working class worldwide has increased. Agrarian economies have disappeared, peasants have been forced from their villages, and to become wage slaves in Nike factories. The newly industrialized world, such as the Pacific region, or the Middle East, has a lot more in common with the West then ever before, workers are organizing and mobilizing now not against this or that petty dictatorship, but against global corporations and global capital, as workers.
The armed struggle guerrilla warfare of the seventies, the nationalist armies in the forest are now a side show in most of these countries, isolated and reduced to ethnic and religious minorities, not mass movements of workers. Nike and other companies expanding into the newly industrialized nations have created an industrial working class, whose experiences are now the same as workers in other industrialized countries.
Our solidarity with workers in Nike factories in the Pacific Basin is not charity, it is seeing a common struggle that is global, there is a global working class that is revolting against capital. When Cicih Sukaesih, a Nike worker from Indonesia traveled across Alberta on a labour sponsored tour she experienced strikes of so called “white privileged workers” (many of them women). These workers made more money and had more privileges than her. At the Alberta Federation of Labour convention, she clearly identified her struggles at Nike with striking Safeway workers. She saw the struggles as class struggles that even here in the advanced, developed west, class struggle continued. Sure the picket lines were safer, but the struggle was the same as she had experienced at Nike in Indonesia. And yes she saw this struggle as women’s struggle, but she clearly identified it as a class struggle. This from someone with little formal education, but who had put her life on the line working for Nike and daring to organize a union under a military dictatorship. That is class-consciousness, something lacking in the declasse activist milieu that whines about white privileged workers.
The Black Panthers, AIM, even workers who faced down cops, Pinkerton agents, the military, all these acted in self defense. While the politics of the Panthers, MOVE, AIM can be critiqued, their actions when armed were NOT those of the Weathermen, RAF or even Ann Hansen and her crew. These movements engaged in self-defense of their communities against the racist police and the state. Just as the Pullman strikers and other strikers have had to defend themselves against armed police and militias. This is self-defense.
I did not say I was against workers and the oppressed arming themselves in self-defense. I stated that advocates of armed struggle would replace mass struggle with the secretive cabal of self-appointed liberators. The struggle of the Panthers and AIM were in the streets and on native land. They were not underground, hiding out and striking out as the Weathermen, RAF, Red Brigades, and Ann and her friends did.
Direct Action is more than trashing a Nike or MacDonalds store. Isolated trashing of a MacDonalds store even if it is during a larger protest is not the same as the mass movement direct action struggle in France by Jean Bove, which also effectively sabotaged MacDonalds. That was a mass action not the action of a self appointed cell of psuedo-guerilla warriors who blow up a MacDonalds and disappear into the night.
Direct Action was when Rosa Parks left the back of the bus and Afro-Americans had sit ins in Whites Only restaurant section. Direct Action was the linking of Afro American community issues with strikes such as the Memphis Workers strike where Martin Luther King was about to join before he was assassinated. Direct Action can also apply to the tactics of Saul Alinsky, when he exhorted Chicago Afro-Americans to pay their rent and bills in pennies.
The Panthers emulated Malcolm X’s call for community self defense, “by any means necessary”. While showing off being armed, the popular photo image from the capitalist press, the reality was that the Panthers “served the people” by creating alternative programs, that the state and capitalism was unwilling to provide in the Afro-American community. The Panthers were effectively practicing Direct Action by providing hot lunch programs to Ghetto children. That was their real success and the real threat to the state.
When communities organize to resist uranium exploration in their watershed, as happened in the B.C. interior in the late 70’s, that threatens their lives and safety. When ordinary people, cub scout leaders, house wives, union workers, take actions which are ‘illegal’ or are confrontational, stopping miners from exploring, blockading roads, this is direct action.
One writer commented, tongue in cheek, that I was hard pressed to explain violence on picket lines. Again, where does the violence originate? From cops protecting scabs crossing the line. The use of scabs by the boss and their protection by the state immediately places the workers in a position of being opposed to the state and capital.
Workers resist on picket lines, they are loath to attack scabs, unless provoked. Workers can be armed as happened in mining strikes in the twenties, but they are armed in self-defense, against armed agents of the state.
I do not believe that my critics would be exhorting us to go out and leaflet striking workers encouraging them to kill and maim scabs. That would be a provocation. Yet the actions of small vanguards of armed struggle advocates are embraced and supported, which is no less vanguardist than exhorting workers to kill scabs.
Finally there are those who complain my critique is divisive, and that it does not represent all kinds of anarchism. Well true, there are many kinds of liberal notions of what anarchism is. Some claim that nudism, bicycle riding, veganism, etc. are forms of anarchism, some claim that environmental issues, or identity politics (gay, feminist, black, etc.) are anarchism. These are as Luigi Fabbri and Sam Dolgoff has pointed out forms of bourgeois anarchism, bourgeois individualism, and mistaking classic liberalism for anarchism. I include below a selection from Victor Serge on the Anarchist movement in France at the turn of the twentieth century, which I feel expresses the failure of this ideology of the politics of the deed and the politics of lifestylism.
Another writer attacks me stating that I put class above other issues. In fact all forms of oppression exist within a class society, they are aspects of capitalism and patriarchal authoritarianism. Regardless of ones identity, one either owns the means of production or sells their labour (even Bakunin encouraged Anarchists to read Marx, something I would remind those who accused me of being a “Marxoid”).
When a company pollutes or degrades the environment it also endangers its workers health and safety both at the source of production and in their communities. So environmental issues are not separate from class issues. When workers are divided along artificial lines of privilege, which is the source of racism, or divided by sexuality, nationality or culture and religion, these too are class issues. To identify with oppressive nationalism’s, religions or cultures, because they are not part of the White First World is to fail to understand the common source of anarchism and other forms of socialist thought in modernism.
The call of Modernism, which has yet to be fulfilled, is Fraternity, Equality, and Liberty, which we can sum up with one word: Solidarity. The idea that an Injury to One is an Injury to All is modernist. The attempt to fracture the movement for human freedom and socialism comes when we separate people into their individual identities. The postmodern dilemma is to see us as gay or straight, white or black, yellow or red, male or female, young or old, First world or Third World, rather than seeing us as all part of the working class.
Freedom for women in the west is no different than freedom for women in the Middle East. Embracing the hajib here to express solidarity with Muslim women is no different than saying Nuns are free to be who they are, and adopt the practice of wearing the whipple. These institutions of patriarchal religions are Medievalist, and oppressive and must be overthrown. No God, No Master is the anarchist answer to identity politics.
As to politics, well that’s what we are all about, if Ann extols the virtues of Armed Struggle I have the right to critique this political misdirection. My little article is far from as vile a threat to the anarchist movement as the very real political naivete of those who call themselves anarchists and claim that Armed Struggle is just “another tool in the tool kit “ of mass resistance to globalization.
To that, no matter how old fashioned and out of sorts it is I reply; Class Struggle NOT Armed Struggle.
Postscript:
“Anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered everything to us...Shot through with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words( which in truth is demanded by all forms of idealism, but which they all forget as they become complacent). Individualism has just been affirmed by our hero Albert Libertad. His teaching which we adopted almost wholesale was: "Don't wait for the revolution. Those who promise revolution are frauds just like the others. Make your own revolution, by being free means and living in comradeship." Its absolute commandment and rule of life was: 'Let the old world go to blazes.' From this position there were naturally many deviations. Some inferred that one should 'live according to Reason and Science, and their impoverished worship of science led them on to all sorts of tomfoolery, such as saltless, vegetarian diet, and fruitarianism and also in certain cases, to tragic ends. We saw young vegetarians involved in pointless struggles against the whole of society. Others decided 'Lets not be outsiders'. The only place for us is the fringe of society. They did not stop to think that society has no fringe, that on one is ever outside it, even in the depth of dungeons, and that their 'conscious egoism', sharing the life of the defeated, linked up from below with the most brutal bourgeois individualism. Many comrades were soon to slide into what was called 'illegalism', a way of life not so much on the fringe of society as on the fringe of morality. 'We refuse to be exploiters or exploited', they declared without perceiving they were continuing to be both these and what is more, becoming hunted men. So ended the second the second explosion of anarchism n France. The first equally hopeless, was that of 1891-4, signaled by the outrages of Ravachol, Emile Henry, Valliant, and Caserio . (Ravachol exploded bombs in the homes of two officials connect with a recent anarchist trial,; he was gullotined in 1892. Valliant was executed for a bomb-explosion in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1893, which killed nobody. Emile Henry threw a bomb in the Cafe Terminus, which, much against his intentions, caused only minor injuries; executed in May 1894. Caserio, a young Italian anarchist, stabbed President Carnot to death in June of the same year.) The same psychological features and the same social factors were present in both phases; the same exacting idealism, in the breasts of uncomplicated men whose energy could find no outlet in achieving a highter dignity or sensibility, because any such outlet was denied to them. These struggles also testified to the failure of an ideology. Between the copious theorizing of Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus, and the rage of Albert Liertad, the collapse of anarchism in the bourgeois jungle was now obvious. In Italy,in Pagine Libere of 1 January 1911, a young Socialist agitator, Benito Mussolini, was chanting the praises of the anarchist desperadoes. These struggles have taught me that, in any man, the best and worst live side by side, and sometimes mingle-that what is worst comes through the corruption of what is best.” Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Chapter 1 World without Escape: France 1906-1912. Pages 18, 20, 42-44.
January 2004
Web posted on Infoshop with discussion and comments, posted to a variety of email lists and on Indymedia and Resist.ca
[1] “propaganda by deed”: that is, the use of violence as a political weapon and a form of political expression. It was used in Europe and the United States by various anarchists. “In France from 1891-4, Ravachol exploded bombs in the homes of two officials connect with a recent anarchist trial,; he was guillotined in 1892. Valliant was executed for a bomb-explosion in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1893, which killed nobody. Emile Henry threw a bomb in the Cafe Terminus, which , much against his intentions, caused only minor injuries; executed in May 1894. Caserio, a young Italian anarchist, stabbed President Carnot to death in June of the same year.” Victor Serge Memoirs of Revolutionary , Chapter 1 page 42. Oxford Press 1963
[2] Benito Mussolini was educated as a socialist and anarchist. He embraced the direct action of street fighting and the use of revolutionary violence; the politics of the deed. Deserting the socialist cause, he applied the ideology of "politics of the deed" to creating the fascist movement in Italy. “In Italy,in Pagine Libere of 1 January 1911, a young Socialist agitator, Benito Mussolini, was chanting the praises of the anarchist desperadoes” Victor Serge Memoirs of Revolutionary , Chapter 1 page 43. Oxford Press 1963.
[3] Nazi Youth Leader in Berlin’s working class Ghetto who led street fighters against Communists. He was killed early on and became the first Martyr for the Nazis, who created the hymn the Horst Wessel song in memory of him.
Published in Social Anarchism #35 Winter 2002-2003 (edited version),
Any Time Now, On Infoshop with discussion and comments, posted to a variety of email lists and on Indymedia and Resist.ca
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