RNC Update Number Two:  Power and Anarchy

by Starhawk

I’m sitting in an odd little restaurant on St. Mark’s place, a brightly lit fast-food place selling a strange combination of Asian and Italian.  We’ve ducked in here because after the Clearninghouse meeting I was so dehydrated I couldn’t make it the tavern where everyone is hanging out without a drink first—and by drink I mean juice or water, not beer.  So I’m sucking on a blueberry aloe vera soda with Asian writing on the can that tastes like grape soda pop with little chunks of aloe vera floating in it, sitting in a booth with a few friends I haven’t seen for a while. Yvonne Liu helped organize the counter convention two years ago for the World Economic Forum protests.  Warcry is looking even thinner than usual, almost too fragile to bear up under her fierce,name, and she is organizing events for Independent media.   Doyle, who joins us midway, is on the media team.  David Graeber is a radical anthropologist, and we’re discussing the sociology of the Clearinghouse meeting we’ve just attended, the regular Thursday night gathering of all the groups planning events for the week of the Republican National Convention.

The Clearinghouse is set up for information sharing, not decision making, and there are so many groups planning so many events and actions that it takes two or three hours simply to announce them all. Outside, people are talk in animated groups.  It took me a long time to get inside because on the way, I kept encountering people I know and wanted to chat with, others I needed to meet and get information from, still others who wanted to ask me something.  Inside, announcements are made over an echoing mike to a mostly empty circle of chairs, with more people crowded around the information tables at the edges.   Our group sitting in the restaurant booth speculates that the more connected you are to the actual organizing, the less likely you are to be sitting in the center listening, and the more likely you are to be outside, socializing.  

I confess to having gone in, to actually having made an announcement, having ascertained that none of the other organizers of the True Security action had actually announced it.  The True Security cluster has called for an action at Herald Square on August 31, the day of direct actions.  We will take over a space, create within it our vision of a world of true security, based on beneficial relationships, not firepower, and then defend it nonviolently by sitting down and refusing to move if the police attack, allowing ourselves to be arrested if need be.

The action plan is still evolving, it’s a product of months of discussions, over email, over conference calls, and now that many of us are here in New York, finally, face to face.  It’s a plan that reflects a complex web of relationships between the groups and individuals that came up with it, relationships that themselves embody the strengths and challenges of a movement without formal hierarchies or leadership, but blessed and cursed with many bright, strong-willed individuals.

The seed for this idea was planted at a potluck dinner in the San Francisco Bay Area back in the spring, an informal occasion when a group of us who know each other from many actions got together with Adam and Corrie, who’d come down from Olympia Washington to get support for their idea of organizing a march from the Democratic National Convention in Boston to the Republican National convention.  That led to talk about plans for the RNC, and about the aftermath of Miami and the difficulties of organizing in a climate of repression and fear, and somehow we came up with the vision of a mass, explicitly nonviolent civil disobedience action.

We could not, of course, organize this from the West Coast, so we ran the idea by people we knew in New York, to see if anyone there would take it up.  They did, and the A31 day of actions was born out of their efforts. They issued a call for a day of nonviolent direct actions, and in a complicated process of New Yorkers meeting face to face and the rest of us chiming in on conference calls, a framework was hammered out.  We tried our best to let the New Yorkers take the lead, but none of us lack for strong opinions, and there are inevitably some tensions that remain unresolved:  tensions between New Yorkers and out-of-towners, between East Coast and West Coast style, between groups of experienced organizers who know each other and hang out together and newer people who are not sure how to navigate their way into a club that has no acknowledged existence nor formal rules of entry.  

West Coasters hug; New Yorkers shake hands. West Coasters have certain ideas about organizing that maybe come from working on a smaller stage, where it is actually possible to have a central core or hearth for a mobilization, to craft unifying themes and ideas, to feel like one whole.  Maybe New Yorkers have long ago recognized that this city and anything that takes place in it is too big, too diverse, too necessarily dispersed, to be coherent in the same way.  But all of this is fascinating speculation, that for me ties into questions about power and authority and groups and leadership that I’ve been pondering for years and could talk and write about forever. Almost twenty years ago I wrote Truth or Dare, Encounters With Power, Authority and Mystery, that came out of very similar issues in the movement of the ‘eighties.  (And which, hey, guess what, you can order off my website www.starhawk.org  if this sort of discussion is interesting to you).  It came out of my recognition that there was a sort of power that was not power-over or formal, structural power, and not power-from-within, or empowerment, but a more slippery, elusive power-with or influence, the differential of weight certain voices carry in a group of equals.   And how we handle that kind of power in a group that aims to be non-hierarchical or anti-authoritarian or directly democratic, how we keep it accountable and still support people who do take on roles of responsibility, whether we succumb to the tyranny of structurelessness or get mired in the rigidity of structure, are never easy questions.  

A few of us have actually been meeting on these questions, trying to hammer out a statement and a set of questions to pose over lunch this coming weekend at the Life After Capitalism conference, and I think it will be helpful to open up the questions even though I don’t expect any easy answers.  We’ve been debating them in Reclaiming for at least twenty-five years, and will probably be debating them when I’m lowered into my grave, where I can rest peacefully and awate rebirth in some happier life where I can please just be Queen of some very small country, issue orders, tell people what to do, and never need consensus from anyone!

We’re also talking about the teach-in that is being organized for Monday night, on anarchy.  We’ve been suffering here from an ongoing media campaign of fearmongering, and the best way to deal with it seems to be to meet it head-on, by organizing a public event with a few of us willing to stand forth and be Known Anarchists.  Before the FTAA protests in Miami, we did something similar and it helped challenge some of the worst propaganda.  I’ve already been publicly trashed in the New York Post a few days ago, along with my friend and training collective partner Lisa Fithian.  We were profiled as some of the ‘professional protestors’ who might be coming, each with out own sidebar.  Lisa had a very unflattering picture, I did not—should I be jealous, or relieved?  But we were both underneath a profile of Jaggi Singh, who is not actually coming to New York, taken when he is evidently on a firing range somewhere. What the Post actually said about us was fairly mild, and basically true—that I’m 53, that I’ve written ten books on neoPaganism and Witchcraft, among other things, that I’ve trained people for these actions.  Lisa was outed as a former student body President of her alma mater, Skidmore College.  Why these should fairly mild facts are all they could dig up (surely I must have done something more truly dangerous in a long, misspent life) and why they should alarm the public, I don’t know.  But it’s amazing how lurid an otherwise admirable fact like having been elected to office looks when placed beneath a picture of a man with a gun.  As for Jaggi, it said that he’d spent seventeen days in jail after the Quebec City protests, accused of possession of a catapult—it didn’t say that later the charges were proved false, it wasn’t his catapult, and in any case it was lobbing teddy bears and other soft stuffed animals over the fence.

Earlier the Post suggested that anarchists might cover ourselves with gunpowder to distract explosive-sniffing dogs from REAL terrorists.  Yesterday the Times quoted the police as saying they were shadowing fifty six dangerous anarchists, each with six cops apiece.   Tonight we’re looking around for them, and wondering if this is a tactic to make us all jealous of each other.  Anyway, in discussing who might be willing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of anarchist media spin, we end up talking about what it means to be an anarchist, with a small a or a big A.

A big A Anarchist has an ideology, a political program, a thought-out political philosophy that draws on specific antecedents.  Me, I’m a small a anarchist, for whom anarchism is a loose term for a political culture that challenges all forms of hierarchy and power-over, and engages in a certain style or organizing, with direct democracy, affinity groups, and actions that confront power.  I’m not even a very good anarchist—I vote.  The ghosts of Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony would smite me if I didn’t.

I might not even choose to apply the word ‘anarchism’ to my own beliefs, but I think there’s a value in using it, the same value and the same reasoning that has led me to call myself a Witch for all these years.  And it’s this—that when there’s a word with so much charge attached, that arouses so much energy, it’s a sign that you are transgressing on territory that the arbiters of power do not want you to tread, that you are starting to think the unthinkable, look behind the curtain.  So, to reclaim ‘Witch’ is to reclaim the image of a powerful woman, the whole constellation of ideas about reality and imagination and energy that have been labeled ‘out of bounds’ by Western modernism (and by a whole lot of radicals and anarchists, for that matter), and to be uppity about it as well.  To reclaim the word ‘Anarchism’ would be to wrest the stick out of hand that’s using it to beat us, that very much does not want us to deeply question power.

And anyway, being a Witch was becoming downright respectable!

The irony of all this disinformation and surveillance and propaganda, for me, is that long ago in my life I made a choice for a certain transparency in choosing to be a writer, which means accepting a particular sort of vulnerability, that of putting out your innermost thoughts and feelings and passions into a hostile world, displaying your deepest wounds and most tender spots for criticism.  To be a writer under surveillance is especially strange.  “What more can you possible want to know?” I want to yell at whoever there is to yell at.  “Read The Fifth Sacred Thing.  Read Walking to Mercury, if you really want to know about my inner life.  Read Webs of Power.  Sign onto my email list.  I’ll save the taxpayers’ dollars by putting my diary up onto the web, for free.”

And meanwhile, things are coming together. We have a ritual space at St. Mark’s in the yard for our Full Moon Ritual on Saturday, August 28.  (8:30 PM, 2nd Ave. and 10th St. everyone welcome.)  We have a schedule of direct action trainings (see below) and spaces to hold them.  UFPJ is moving ahead with its lawsuit to get Central Park for a rally, and we have a plan to have roving groups of trainers doing on-the-spot nonviolent direct action trainings at the gathering point or at the rally itself.

Now I’m heading to the Life After Capitalism conference—expect a report on that sometime this weekend.

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