NEW YORK TIMES (December 2, 1999)
...the biggest American demonstration yet against global trade here had turned into an [sic] burst of window-breaking and looting late Tuesday afternoon.
A surge of violence that ended in a civil emergency began when a knot of people dressed in black broke away from the main demonstration and started overturning trash containers, stoking fires and smashing windows of stores and restaurants....
How the thin line was crossed from nonviolent protest to urban disorder was being dissected here today....
USA TODAY (December 2, 1999)
..."I condemn the small number (of protesters) who were violent," Clinton told delegates.......After Tuesday's violent demonstrations rocked the normally placid city....
NEWSWEEK (December 13, 1999)
In a ruckus over foreign trade, a surge of violence rocks the placid '90s. ...Enter the anarchists. A few dozen evidently came from a Eugene, Ore.-based group that had staged a similar, violent protest in their home downtown earlier this year.... Whoever they were, in fatigues and black masks, they opened their knapsacks and got out their hammers, spray paint, and M-80 firecrackers.... they began their assault on the brand-name retailers: FAO Schwarz, Starbucks, Old Navy and others. They broke windows and painted their A-in-a-circle logo on walls.
TIME (December 13, 1999) Despite, and because of, violence, anti-WTO protesters were heard...
...Things got serious when scattered groups of self-described Black Block anarchists, wearing all-black outfits with handkerchiefs or hoods covering their faces, started to smash windows and trash businesses, giving special attention to companies such as the Gap and Nike that have been accused of using low-wage or child labor to produce some of their merchandise.... Once word got out that the streets were haywire, a wave of garden-variety thugs headed downtown to smash the windows at Radio Shack and walk off with CD players. Anarchist websites subsequently complained that their boys [sic] in black were blamed for the apolitical looting by the later group that ruined their well-planned attack....
You get the idea. Originating at the WTO protest in Seattle, this has become the standard operating procedure by the media, painting anarchists as violent. But you have to look at what the anarchists attacked -- they went after property, not people.
It's a fine distinction that gets lost in the shuffle. Look at the Oklahoma City bombing -- that was an act of violence, killing over a hundred people, if memory serves. To compare something like that with busting windows at a coffee shop is ludicrous, upon examination.
The fact is that anarchists are nonviolent -- that does not mean anarchists won't vandalize things, however, to make a political point. The point made is that in capitalist society, things matter more than people. Human beings are considered expendable assets, while property -- along with labor the engine that drives capitalist wealth -- is considered very valuable.
So, a sweatshop is a valuable asset to a firm like Nike or the Gap -- it's the property that allows them to sell their merchandise at a profit. The people working in there are incidental to the firm; they can always bring in more people. That's why anarchists go after the property; it's the softest part of the capitalist.
le there are plenty of sweatshops in the US (the garment industry depends on sweatshop labor), many of the biggest offenders are using Third World labor for their products, because it's so much cheaper, and the autocracies we support ensure that work conditions remain crappy and pay lousy. But those factories are far away, so anarchists in America can't get to them.
we can get to pristine storefronts of those same corporations who sell the products of that sweatshop labor. That's the way American capitalism works -- sort of like The Wizard of Oz -- don't pay attention to the man behind the curtains, please. Stuff just magically appears, and most Americans probably don't think about where it comes from. They just buy the stuff, and that's that.
it's the way companies like it -- blissful ignorance. But if you look at the labels, and you see countries like Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Phillippines, China, Ecuador, etc. -- odds are you're buying a product made from that kind of labor. Same with coffee -- it comes from plantations in Latin America, which has never been a model example of human rights.
Recognizing this, the anarchist vandalizes corporate property, as a way of revealing that man behind the curtain, of exposing the fallacy of American capitalism, revealing the very ugly face of uncaring greed behind the smiley face of the consumer society.
This kind of direct action scares the hell out of Corporate America, frankly, which is why they keep referring to it as violence. They want the everyday American to fear it too. Fear remains the glue that keeps American society together -- fear and rage, really.
Anarchists are not violent people -- you want violence, find your local neo-nazi groups, and you'll see violence. Hate groups excel at in-your-face violence, but we really don't hear much about that, because if a bum gets set on fire, or a minority gets beaten or murdered -- well, that's just a person here or there. Again, tot the corporate media, that's just a collateral loss. No big deal.
But vandalism and sabotage -- that's something scary, because it's attacking a systemic problem -- capitalism -- rather than an individual or an ethnic group. Imagine how quickly America would become an overt police state if in every city, all at once, people broke the windows of Gaps, Old Navy, Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Starbucks, Blockbuster, etc., etc. Martial law would probably be declared, the authorities would be so scared.
The capitalist press is in lock-step with its duty, and has willfully conflated the terms "vandalism" and "violence" repeatedly to mesh the two ideas in your head. But to follow their line of reasoning, then tearing open a package would appear to be violence -- I mean, you're rending open a pristine wrapper, right? Now, they would say, "you bought that product, so it's your property, to do as you like -- packages are designed to be opened".
True, but the reality is that violence is perpetrated by the authorities daily -- against living people, but always with some justification. People get shot by cops daily for carrying cell phones or wallets ("we thought it was a gun, so we shot him 41 times"). People get bombed by the US all the time, even on the whim of the President (I'm thinking of his bombing of the Sudan and Afghanistan -- sending cruise missiles into factories a few years ago, completely out of the blue).
To the anarchist, you can't really do violence to property -- you can only commit sabotage or vandalism to it. If you spraypaint a circle-A on a wall, is that doing violence to that wall? By the media's definition, it's a definite "yes". But to those in power, any direct action is unforgivable -- they don't like unpredictable, uncontrollable popular protest. The prefer safe, predictable march-and-chant stuff. They don't like when people get "out of hand" -- that being anything they don't approve of, since they are inherently reasonable, of course.
Anarchists are nonviolent -- it doesn't mean we are pacifists. We will defend ourselves, if attacked. But we aren't a bunch of street thugs out to bash heads. That's a position well-occupied by hate groups.
We are about attacking the status quo of capitalist power, and that means going after what they value most, which is their property. This doesn't mean theft, either -- note in the above article, the anarchists vandalized stores, but they didn't loot. That's a very clear political point they sought to make. To the anarchist, windows and dumpsters can be replaced -- they're stuff, not people. 5/27/00