abbielives!
9th December 2007, 22:35
Indigenism, Anarchism, and the State
.........
by Ward Churchill
April 29, 2005
Upping the Anti #1
Ward Churchill is one of the most outspoken activists
and scholars in North America and a leading
commentator on indigenous issues. Churchill's many
books include Marxism and Native Americans; Fantasies
of the Master Race; Struggle for the Land; The
COINTELPRO Papers; Genocide, Ecocide, and
Colonization; Pacifism as Pathology; and A Little
Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the
Americas. In his lectures and published works,
Churchill explores the themes of genocide in the
Americas, racism, historical and legal
(re)interpretation of conquest and colonization,
environmental destruction of Indian lands, government
repression of political movements, literary and
cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to
the status quo.
Churchill has recently come under attack for views
expressed in the article "Some People Push Back: On
the Justice of Roosting Chickens," written in the
immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin
Towers and the Pentagon. An important part of the
future of US academic freedom in the coming years will
likely be determined by the outcome of the ongoing
attempts to strip Ward Churchill of his academic
position at Colorado University in Boulder. Two
members of Autonomy & Solidarity sat down with Ward
Churchill in Toronto in November of 2003 to do this
interview. It was transcribed by Clarissa Lassaline
and edited by Tom Keefer, Dave Mitchell, and Valerie
Zink.
Upping The Anti: We want to start off by asking you
about your thoughts on the anti-globalization movement
which, in terms of anti-capitalist struggles, has been
one of the most significant developments in the past
decade. This movement has also been criticized in the
US context, as being largely made up of white middle
class kids running around "summit hopping." What's
your take?
Ward Churchill: I think the anti-globalization
movement, for lack of a better term, is a very
positive development in the sense that it re-infuses
the opposition with a sense of purpose, enthusiasm,
and vibrancy. The downside is that it's a
counter-analytical movement in that it thinks it's
something new. We used to call it "anti-imperialism,"
just straight up. The idea that "globalization" is
something new, rather than a continuation of dynamics
that are at least 500 years deep, is misleading. That
needs to be understood.
UTA: In your book Struggle For The Land, there's an
essay called "I Am Indigenous." Can you elaborate a
bit on the politics and genealogy of indigenism?
WC: Perhaps I can by way of your introduction of
yourselves. You know, you say you're post-Leninists.
Fine. But why are you something that goes beyond
Leninism, rather than something that isn't?
UTA: It's a reflection of the roots of where our
political grouping came from.
WC: But you top that off by describing yourselves as
revolutionaries, and I'm saying "why?" Do you aspire
to overthrow the presiding order in the Canadian state
so that you can reorganize the state in a more
constructive fashion?
Then you're a revolutionary. Do you want to see the
Canadian state here when you're done in some form or
another? If not, then you're a devolutionary and you
might want to call it by its right name.
UTA: So would you say that no anarchists could call
themselves revolutionaries?
WC: If they do, they're deluding themselves. They're
not understanding themselves or the tradition that
they're espousing in proper terms because, for
starters, anarchists are explicitly anti-statist. And
the object of a revolution is to change the regime of
power in a given state structure. So I think
"revolutionary" is a misnomer.
UTA: One of the issues with devolution is that, at
least potentially, it represents an attempt to go back
to some kind of ideal way the world once was. But we
can't just roll back the clock of history.
WC: No, of course not. But again we're into this
implicitly Marxist progression, and anarchists aren't
especially progressive. In fact, you get a physical
fight from some of them for using that term, because
they consider it an insult. And I think properly so.
There's no immutable law of history. The structures,
however, aren't immutable either, and they can be
devolved.
One conflation of terms that really bothers me a lot,
which seems to be plaguing the discourse still, is the
conflation of the term "nation" and the term "state."
You have this entity out there called "the United
Nations." It really should have been called "the
United States," because to be eligible even for
admission to the Assembly you have to be organized in
that centralized, arbitrary structure. No "nations" as
such are even eligible for admission to the United
Nations. "The United States" was a name already taken,
however, and this was very useful in obfuscating the
reality.
But the upshot of that is that you've got a whole lot
of anarchists running around thinking they're
anti-nationalist, that nationality, nationalism in all
forms, is necessarily some sort of an evil to be
combated, when that's exactly what they're trying to
create. You've got four or five thousand nations on
the planet; you've got two hundred states. They're
using "anti-nationalist" as a code word for being
anti-statist. With indigenous peoples, nationality is
an affirmative ideal, and it hasn't got any similarity
at all to state structures.
You may have nations that are also states, but you've
got most nations rejecting statism. So you can make an
argument, as I have, that the assertion of sovereignty
on the part of indigenous nations is an explicitly
anti-statist ideal, and the basis of commonality with
people who define themselves as anarchists. We've got
to deal with our own bases of confusion in order to be
able to interact with one another in a respectful and
constructive way.
UTA: Are there correlations between your indigenous
perspective and anarchism? Many people might make the
argument that, in fact, indigenism is an ancestor to
anarchism, and not vice versa.
WC: Well, that is precisely my argument. The two are
not interchangeable, point for point, but they have
far more in common than they have dividing them, if
each is properly understood. And part of the task here
is to make them properly understood. If you look at
green anarchy, for better or worse, you're going to
find all kinds of references to commonalities with
indigenous peoples on every basis, from social
organisation to environmental perspective. It will
take some time, but you can make that conceptual
bridge between indigenism and anarchism, and it's
understood.
I would see the main distinction, on this continent,
as being a detachment from base. Indigenous peoples
are grounded, quite literally. There's a relationship
to the land that has evolved over thousands of years,
and that's completely denied to the people from the
settler culture who self-describe as anarchists. With
that distinction made, however, we've got all kinds of
principles in common, aspirations in common,
perspectives in common, and we need to build upon
those in order to develop a respectful set of
relations that allow us to act in unity against that
common oppressor that we share.
UTA: After the Seattle actions, you were part of the
debate around the whole question of "diversity of
tactics." Do you see the Black Bloc as being an
interesting or relevant political phenomenon?
WC: It's not that I think that breaking the windows of
Starbucks is somehow going to bring the system
crashing to its knees, or that they even had a
conception of what they were actually up against.
Clinton deployed Delta Force for that one in case
things really did start to get serious. I mean that's
as serious as it gets in terms of repressive capacity
in the United States.
These are the surgical assassination units, and they
were deployed in Seattle.
But if you're going to go up against that, or if
you're actually going to do serious damage to the
structure of things, it isn't going to happen in some
sort of a frontal confrontation with whatever
deployment of force the state makes. So it is
symbolic, in the sense that it's educational and kind
of empowering. But if you're going to engage with that
force, you're not going to simply wake up one morning,
take a pill along with your glass of water and go out
prepared to do it. You have to build the
consciousness, you have to build the psychology, you
have to build the experiential base, and you have to
build the theoretical base, and that happens step by
step by step. Maybe the thing that happened in Seattle
was a sort of, "let's get out of the chat rooms and
see if we can't actually make a physical
confrontation." There hasn't been anything significant
along those lines for 25, 30 years in the US.
Now, on the level of street confrontation, what can we
deduce from that experience? Well, maybe a first
lesson would be: if you actually want to engage in
street confrontations as part of a further building
trajectory, you might want to ditch the uniforms and
stop self-identifying as somebody the police want to
neutralize immediately. Unmask yourself, put on a
phony beard, or a clean shave. Mask yourself in
another way. Just this level of tactical evolution,
they've refused. And this is part of what leads some
people to purport that the Black Bloc is more of a
fashion statement than it is a serious political
tendency. I'm not convinced of that, but people are
clinging to their signs and symbols at a very basic
level, in a way that precludes taking the action
further. You get these cataclysmic statements of what
is necessary, and yet they won't even ditch the funny
little signifier of their identity as a Black Bloccer.
UTA: Is there a correlation between the militant
tactics and direct confrontation against the state
proposed by the Black Bloc, and the ways in which the
Weather Underground evolved from the Days of Rage in
Chicago? Do you see a similar kind of progression?
What are the lessons to be learned from how those
movements failed in the 60s?
WC: The Weather Underground is another thing that I
will completely defend. Of the spectrum of responses
mounted by the white left at the time, Weather was the
most valid response of all, which does not mean that
it actually had a viable strategy. But the response
pattern was entirely legitimate. But ultimately, they
got boxed into symbolic actions, and that is
explicitly the case now as well.
Brian Flanagan and Mark Rudd, who are in this new film
about the Weathermen, are saying "you know, we made a
conscious decision to do only property actions," which
was not the original impulse and not the original
understanding. It was a sort of wounded response to
having three people killed in the Greenwich townhouse
explosion. Well, in human terms I understand that
these were their friends and all that, but if you are
actually serious about engaging in an armed struggle
and plan on testing the capacity of the United States,
you have to anticipate that you're going to incur
casualties. And three is hardly an insurmountable toll
that's been taken. So again, you had middle class kids
who were posturing as something else, and legitimately
wanted to be something else and tried to transcend
their origins. But they couldn't do it in and of
themselves, and they didn't really have an interactive
relationship with other movements, organisations, or
people coming from a different experiential background
and temper. They were a sort of bourgeois response. So
you're saying you're going to do one thing, but
actually you're unprepared to do it. I can understand
that, but I don't accept that as being a model.
I'm more encouraged by the fact that people are
looking seriously at the Black Liberation Army (BLA)
and such, despite the valid critique that there was a
certain Stalinist content to the organization. And
that raises the question of how exactly, without
getting into a centralized, arbitrarily disciplined
organization, you mount a clandestine struggle. That's
a serious question.
How do you go about it? It's not laissez-faire, it's
not everybody do your own thing. It can't be, or
you're dead. But the BLA and other such organizations
were willing to sustain casualties in a serious way
over a protracted period.
And they were ultimately burnt out because they had no
basis for recruiting additional members from some
broader context or mass movement to replace the
casualties, and that's a lesson to be learned and
addressed as well.
Weather presented a certain example, but not a model.
>From that example you can extrapolate the next model,
say, the BLA or the Puerto Rican Independence
movement. You can analyze and understand where it was
that they went wrong, address those issues, and build
a more viable model now. But you can't do that based
on knee-jerk reactions and notions of personal purity,
which is my critique of pacifism. You're probably
familiar with that critique, and the people who will
be reading this are probably reasonably familiar with
it as well.
But pacifism is not the only dimension that this would
apply to, anarchists in general have this zealous
notion of the purity of the political. They are
dismissive of anybody who defines themselves as being
part of a national liberation movement, without
examining that movement in any coherent way. When
someone sits down and talks with them about it, well
then their objections evaporate. But they won't
abandon the purity of whatever the particular posture
is that they're occupying long enough to become
effective.
That's the problem with the refusal to abandon the
mask and the black T-shirts in a certain context too.
The Black Bloc is more interested in the affirmation
of identity than they are in actually accomplishing
their goals and objectives.
These are transient things, I would hope. I don't see
them as being a basis to dismiss or discard the
impulse at all. I see the impulse as being primarily a
positive impulse, and you need to take to its logical
set of conclusions.
The Black Bloc is the preoccupation of anarchism.
Their willingness to physically engage the state at a
certain level, as well as to engage in discussions
that interrogate their own sets of precepts, are both
encouraging signs.
UTA: It's clear that the Canadian and US governments
have expressed serious concerns about the
anti-globalization movement and the radical wing
within it. You've written extensively on the
repression of radical movements in the 60s and 70s,
and specifically about COINTELPRO. Can you talk about
some of the key lessons that radicals today should
keep in mind?
WC: You have to be a thinking movement. We can
outthink these guys in certain respects. Part of that
is never underestimating what it is that they're
capable of, and never underestimating our capacity to
come up with a situational response to them. In what
used to be called counter-intelligence, now it's
called counter-terrorism, you have guys who devote
their entire careers to this. They have an aptitude, a
flare for it. And by the time they retire they get
really goddamn good at it. In a certain sense, their
work is based on perceiving what in the immediacy of a
situation might be best, based on their experience, to
accomplish a desired result. You could say that it's
more intuitive than codified, and our response has to
be the same. We have to develop bodies of expertise
based on experience in dealing with these things, not
just reading the books, and understand that we can't
come up with a formula or a recipe of what it is that
will work. We have to use common sense and critical
understandings of how counter-intelligence processes
have worked in the past, and to the best of our
ability, obtain information on what they have in place
now.
I mentioned the Delta Force earlier. There's actually
a protocol that allows the President the discretion to
suspend the Posse Comitas act and to utilize
particular forces within the US military for the
maintenance of civil order.
They go to the very highest shelf, the "special" of
the Special Forces. All the Delta Force does is train
for and execute missions to take out strategic targets
among oppositional groups, wherever they happen to be.
They were in Seattle in case they were necessary to
eliminate the leadership, as defined by the
intelligence sources of the US, of the people who shut
down the World Trade Conference. They've also been
introduced to control prison riots. They were deployed
at Waco, which ought to tell you something, and they
were deployed at Ruby Ridge. This needs to be absorbed
into our collective understanding of what we're up
against and to shape the nature of our response
patterns accordingly.
I think that this takes care of the idea that we're
going to do this by candlelight vigils, moral
arguments, petition drives and electoral politics: all
of these can be useful in terms of organizing our own
communities, but it's going to have absolutely no
effect on the structure of power. We're going to have
to go to bare knuckles and understand the mechanics of
power, and how it ultimately maintains itself -
obfuscation, mystification, and by keeping people
confused and divided. If people don't stay divided
they're going to ratchet it up to the next increment,
which includes false incarcerations and all the rest
of that. And ultimately you're going to be dealing
with the US military's Delta Force. Those are the
terms of engagement.
I run through all of that because by and large, even
among the self-described most militant sectors,
there's not really a recognition of what it means.
They consider themselves to be imbued with certain
sets of options based upon varying degrees of social
privilege, as if those are going to continue to apply
if they actually become a serious threat to the status
quo.
Now based on that consciousness, you can begin to
develop techniques that apply to the given situations,
and there is no recipe for that either. Maybe it's
affinity groups in some places but it's really
contingent on the situation.
For example, in some cases Black Bloccers say that
they're going to organize based on long term
friendships and interaction with people who they know
are not infiltrators because they hooked up together
when, in all probability, they were too young to have
been recruited by the FBI. And they've evolved as an
insular, self-contained little group ever since. It's
certainly hard for intelligence agencies to penetrate
groups like that.
The national structure of the American Indian Movement
was penetrated pretty successfully, because you had
people drawn together in an organization from a whole
variety of locations to function as a sort of a
governing council.
That was a really bad model. Where we were
impenetrable was actually on the ground with the
action end of the organization, because these were all
family units. The Means family, the Robidoux-Peltier
family and their cousins were all related and had
grown up together. Well, how exactly do you plant
somebody in the middle of that? You don't.
So I would say that affinity groups, however they are
to be defined, might be the situational response in a
given context. There are others. The thing that is
most critically important is to thoroughly understand
the techniques that are used by counter-intelligence,
usually at the lower levels, and not do the job for
them. That means not gratuitously calling people
'cops' in order to resolve political disagreements,
which has been an endemic practice on the left. Often
intelligence agencies don't even need to insert
provocateurs because they can rely on the activists to
do it to themselves. Maybe they stimulate it a few
times; they plant a few documents, they do whatever
they do. The rule of thumb should be: if it acts like
a cop and talks like a cop, maybe you treat it like a
cop. But you don't call it one. You don't feed into
that. If somebody is destabilizing and threatening and
they're compromising the integrity or the security of
the group, you simply eliminate that person by putting
them outside the group. You don't make a public show
of it, and you don't put out wanted posters unless you
actually have concrete evidence that this is a police
operative or infiltrator.
See, we put ourselves in such a compromised position
from internal dynamics and bad practices that all they
have to do is take this tottering structure, push it,
and give it some momentum. At the level that we're
organizing now, bad practice is our worst enemy, not
the police state. There isn't anybody that I know of
who is actually mounting a clandestine operation to
try to challenge the authority of the state at this
point. We're in a building period, and how we build is
contingent, in a large part, on the internalization of
these lessons.
UTA: In the US in the 60s, some people on the radical
left saw that the elements that were moving first into
struggle, the actual radical forces that could
overthrow the system, were the movements that had the
least to loose and the most to gain from such
struggles: the Black Panthers, the American Indian
Movement, etc. But how can we achieve the destruction
of state power without the conscious, active support
of the majority of the people, including significant
sections of the white settler population?
WC: You can't win so long as the bulk of the
population is actively in some fashion or another
deployed against you. But that doesn't mean that the
bulk of the population ultimately has to actively join
you either.
I think this is where the Weathermen misunderstood
what the dynamic was at the time. They thought people
were much more actively committed to physical
engagement with the state than ultimately proved to be
the case. In retrospect, it's clear that they weren't.
The Weathermen thought they saw a parade and tried to
position themselves to lead it. They were going to be
the vanguard. What's new? We've got three hundred
white guys who decided they had their finger on the
pulse of history, so they were going to jump in front.
They said they were acting in solidarity, but they
were defining themselves as a vanguard. The white guy
is going to lead the Revolution. They just
misdiagnosed the conditions that might precipitate
revolution, and ended up isolating themselves.
This would also apply to the BLA, although they had
far stronger base in the community than the Weatherman
ultimately turned out to have. The significance of the
role of the armed struggle was profoundly
misunderstood at that particular juncture by virtually
all of the actors. They believed that the armed
struggle was going to be the catalyst in bringing
about a comprehensive transformation of society. And
that wasn't the case at all. What led them to this
false conclusion was a withdrawal of consent on the
part of increasingly massive numbers of people. You
really had a significant proportion of the population
that was rejecting, in substantial part, the thrust of
US policy. They weren't going to go to war with it,
they were just not going to contribute to it. That's
the key.
You don't have to have the preponderance of the
population engaged in some sort of a final campaign to
bring down the government. What you do need is the
ability to cause an increasing number of people to
withdraw consent from some key sectors that keep the
system functioning. And if an appreciable number of
those people are going into more active forms of
resistance and are supportive, at least to the extent
that they won't give you up to the cops and that maybe
they will make a contribution, be it monetarily, or by
providing you sanctuary, I think that's attainable
over the long haul. You have to have a much greater
weight in order to take the structure intact and then
rearrange its organization, than you need to have it
begin to unravel and collapse, and that's actually the
aspiration that I hold.
You also have to create counter-models that people can
look at, that they can be attracted to: "Oh yeah,
there is another way of doing this and maybe I'd be
more comfortable in that context. I don't know for
sure because I haven't lived in it, but it looks like
something I might like to explore." That leads to
withdrawal, and creates doubt as to the inevitability
of state structures and that's what you're trying to
create.
Not that you're going to supplant the structure of the
state with co-ops, or little land occupations,
collectives and so forth. In the 70s in particular,
there was this whole notion that you could simply
create a society that you want within the shell of the
old one, and eventually the old one will wither away.
Well that ain't going to happen either. You're going
to reach a certain threshold and then the state will
begin to actively repress you and try to crush you.
The Black Panthers' breakfast for children program,
their community clinics, alternative educational
institutions, job placement programs, housing
initiatives, and all the rest, when viewed as a
package in and of themselves may seem like a very
liberal agenda. But it was framed in terms of a very
coherent program of self-determination, of
self-sufficiency, that sought to remove those service
delivery sectors of responsibility from the state, and
to place them in the hands of the community.
You don't see a lot of that happening these days. For
most people in the anarchist community who organize in
their little collectives and get together and eat
their bean sprouts and shit. it's only for themselves,
at the present time. If you want to talk to factory
workers, you need to connect with them where they are,
not where you think they should be. You need to get
over your prohibition on ashtrays. You keep asking me
why nobody shows up, except you, when you organize an
event - there's the answer. I've answered the question
about 15 times. You may have ideas, you may have
counter models and they might be constructive, but if
people - coming from the bowling alley or something -
have to spend 15 minutes reading your fucking signs
about what they can or can't do in exchange for the
privilege of entering your sacred premises, they're
going to go bowling instead. Get over your bicycles
and go down and bend a wrench with a gear-head for a
while. Do what he's fucking doing.
Maybe he'll learn how to talk to you and vice versa.
But that's like shedding the black uniforms. It's a
real psychological barrier to some anarchists, because
they've got the solution to the world's problems
somehow in code form in their minds. They posit an
implicit demand that people are supposed to
acknowledge the superiority of their vision as the
price of admission. So get the fuck off the university
campus and down into a union hall. Put ashtrays on the
goddamn tables. Make some babysitting services
available. And try to package it in a set of terms
that can appeal to the people you're trying to reach.
Call it spin if you will, call it packaging, call it
Madison Avenue - but how you pedal it, how you try to
reach people, is really important. They're probably
not about to put safety pins in their eyelids and all
the rest of that shit. I understand why you're doing
it, and I'm not objecting: it's just that you've got
to realize that there are some other people out there
you need to reach if you're going to be successful,
who don't feel that way. And you need to respect that.
Because you're ultimately demanding that they respect
you. That's a reciprocal proposition.
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-l...19/msg00017.htm (http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2005w19/msg00017.htm)
support Ward @ http://www.wardchurchill.net/
.........
by Ward Churchill
April 29, 2005
Upping the Anti #1
Ward Churchill is one of the most outspoken activists
and scholars in North America and a leading
commentator on indigenous issues. Churchill's many
books include Marxism and Native Americans; Fantasies
of the Master Race; Struggle for the Land; The
COINTELPRO Papers; Genocide, Ecocide, and
Colonization; Pacifism as Pathology; and A Little
Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the
Americas. In his lectures and published works,
Churchill explores the themes of genocide in the
Americas, racism, historical and legal
(re)interpretation of conquest and colonization,
environmental destruction of Indian lands, government
repression of political movements, literary and
cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to
the status quo.
Churchill has recently come under attack for views
expressed in the article "Some People Push Back: On
the Justice of Roosting Chickens," written in the
immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin
Towers and the Pentagon. An important part of the
future of US academic freedom in the coming years will
likely be determined by the outcome of the ongoing
attempts to strip Ward Churchill of his academic
position at Colorado University in Boulder. Two
members of Autonomy & Solidarity sat down with Ward
Churchill in Toronto in November of 2003 to do this
interview. It was transcribed by Clarissa Lassaline
and edited by Tom Keefer, Dave Mitchell, and Valerie
Zink.
Upping The Anti: We want to start off by asking you
about your thoughts on the anti-globalization movement
which, in terms of anti-capitalist struggles, has been
one of the most significant developments in the past
decade. This movement has also been criticized in the
US context, as being largely made up of white middle
class kids running around "summit hopping." What's
your take?
Ward Churchill: I think the anti-globalization
movement, for lack of a better term, is a very
positive development in the sense that it re-infuses
the opposition with a sense of purpose, enthusiasm,
and vibrancy. The downside is that it's a
counter-analytical movement in that it thinks it's
something new. We used to call it "anti-imperialism,"
just straight up. The idea that "globalization" is
something new, rather than a continuation of dynamics
that are at least 500 years deep, is misleading. That
needs to be understood.
UTA: In your book Struggle For The Land, there's an
essay called "I Am Indigenous." Can you elaborate a
bit on the politics and genealogy of indigenism?
WC: Perhaps I can by way of your introduction of
yourselves. You know, you say you're post-Leninists.
Fine. But why are you something that goes beyond
Leninism, rather than something that isn't?
UTA: It's a reflection of the roots of where our
political grouping came from.
WC: But you top that off by describing yourselves as
revolutionaries, and I'm saying "why?" Do you aspire
to overthrow the presiding order in the Canadian state
so that you can reorganize the state in a more
constructive fashion?
Then you're a revolutionary. Do you want to see the
Canadian state here when you're done in some form or
another? If not, then you're a devolutionary and you
might want to call it by its right name.
UTA: So would you say that no anarchists could call
themselves revolutionaries?
WC: If they do, they're deluding themselves. They're
not understanding themselves or the tradition that
they're espousing in proper terms because, for
starters, anarchists are explicitly anti-statist. And
the object of a revolution is to change the regime of
power in a given state structure. So I think
"revolutionary" is a misnomer.
UTA: One of the issues with devolution is that, at
least potentially, it represents an attempt to go back
to some kind of ideal way the world once was. But we
can't just roll back the clock of history.
WC: No, of course not. But again we're into this
implicitly Marxist progression, and anarchists aren't
especially progressive. In fact, you get a physical
fight from some of them for using that term, because
they consider it an insult. And I think properly so.
There's no immutable law of history. The structures,
however, aren't immutable either, and they can be
devolved.
One conflation of terms that really bothers me a lot,
which seems to be plaguing the discourse still, is the
conflation of the term "nation" and the term "state."
You have this entity out there called "the United
Nations." It really should have been called "the
United States," because to be eligible even for
admission to the Assembly you have to be organized in
that centralized, arbitrary structure. No "nations" as
such are even eligible for admission to the United
Nations. "The United States" was a name already taken,
however, and this was very useful in obfuscating the
reality.
But the upshot of that is that you've got a whole lot
of anarchists running around thinking they're
anti-nationalist, that nationality, nationalism in all
forms, is necessarily some sort of an evil to be
combated, when that's exactly what they're trying to
create. You've got four or five thousand nations on
the planet; you've got two hundred states. They're
using "anti-nationalist" as a code word for being
anti-statist. With indigenous peoples, nationality is
an affirmative ideal, and it hasn't got any similarity
at all to state structures.
You may have nations that are also states, but you've
got most nations rejecting statism. So you can make an
argument, as I have, that the assertion of sovereignty
on the part of indigenous nations is an explicitly
anti-statist ideal, and the basis of commonality with
people who define themselves as anarchists. We've got
to deal with our own bases of confusion in order to be
able to interact with one another in a respectful and
constructive way.
UTA: Are there correlations between your indigenous
perspective and anarchism? Many people might make the
argument that, in fact, indigenism is an ancestor to
anarchism, and not vice versa.
WC: Well, that is precisely my argument. The two are
not interchangeable, point for point, but they have
far more in common than they have dividing them, if
each is properly understood. And part of the task here
is to make them properly understood. If you look at
green anarchy, for better or worse, you're going to
find all kinds of references to commonalities with
indigenous peoples on every basis, from social
organisation to environmental perspective. It will
take some time, but you can make that conceptual
bridge between indigenism and anarchism, and it's
understood.
I would see the main distinction, on this continent,
as being a detachment from base. Indigenous peoples
are grounded, quite literally. There's a relationship
to the land that has evolved over thousands of years,
and that's completely denied to the people from the
settler culture who self-describe as anarchists. With
that distinction made, however, we've got all kinds of
principles in common, aspirations in common,
perspectives in common, and we need to build upon
those in order to develop a respectful set of
relations that allow us to act in unity against that
common oppressor that we share.
UTA: After the Seattle actions, you were part of the
debate around the whole question of "diversity of
tactics." Do you see the Black Bloc as being an
interesting or relevant political phenomenon?
WC: It's not that I think that breaking the windows of
Starbucks is somehow going to bring the system
crashing to its knees, or that they even had a
conception of what they were actually up against.
Clinton deployed Delta Force for that one in case
things really did start to get serious. I mean that's
as serious as it gets in terms of repressive capacity
in the United States.
These are the surgical assassination units, and they
were deployed in Seattle.
But if you're going to go up against that, or if
you're actually going to do serious damage to the
structure of things, it isn't going to happen in some
sort of a frontal confrontation with whatever
deployment of force the state makes. So it is
symbolic, in the sense that it's educational and kind
of empowering. But if you're going to engage with that
force, you're not going to simply wake up one morning,
take a pill along with your glass of water and go out
prepared to do it. You have to build the
consciousness, you have to build the psychology, you
have to build the experiential base, and you have to
build the theoretical base, and that happens step by
step by step. Maybe the thing that happened in Seattle
was a sort of, "let's get out of the chat rooms and
see if we can't actually make a physical
confrontation." There hasn't been anything significant
along those lines for 25, 30 years in the US.
Now, on the level of street confrontation, what can we
deduce from that experience? Well, maybe a first
lesson would be: if you actually want to engage in
street confrontations as part of a further building
trajectory, you might want to ditch the uniforms and
stop self-identifying as somebody the police want to
neutralize immediately. Unmask yourself, put on a
phony beard, or a clean shave. Mask yourself in
another way. Just this level of tactical evolution,
they've refused. And this is part of what leads some
people to purport that the Black Bloc is more of a
fashion statement than it is a serious political
tendency. I'm not convinced of that, but people are
clinging to their signs and symbols at a very basic
level, in a way that precludes taking the action
further. You get these cataclysmic statements of what
is necessary, and yet they won't even ditch the funny
little signifier of their identity as a Black Bloccer.
UTA: Is there a correlation between the militant
tactics and direct confrontation against the state
proposed by the Black Bloc, and the ways in which the
Weather Underground evolved from the Days of Rage in
Chicago? Do you see a similar kind of progression?
What are the lessons to be learned from how those
movements failed in the 60s?
WC: The Weather Underground is another thing that I
will completely defend. Of the spectrum of responses
mounted by the white left at the time, Weather was the
most valid response of all, which does not mean that
it actually had a viable strategy. But the response
pattern was entirely legitimate. But ultimately, they
got boxed into symbolic actions, and that is
explicitly the case now as well.
Brian Flanagan and Mark Rudd, who are in this new film
about the Weathermen, are saying "you know, we made a
conscious decision to do only property actions," which
was not the original impulse and not the original
understanding. It was a sort of wounded response to
having three people killed in the Greenwich townhouse
explosion. Well, in human terms I understand that
these were their friends and all that, but if you are
actually serious about engaging in an armed struggle
and plan on testing the capacity of the United States,
you have to anticipate that you're going to incur
casualties. And three is hardly an insurmountable toll
that's been taken. So again, you had middle class kids
who were posturing as something else, and legitimately
wanted to be something else and tried to transcend
their origins. But they couldn't do it in and of
themselves, and they didn't really have an interactive
relationship with other movements, organisations, or
people coming from a different experiential background
and temper. They were a sort of bourgeois response. So
you're saying you're going to do one thing, but
actually you're unprepared to do it. I can understand
that, but I don't accept that as being a model.
I'm more encouraged by the fact that people are
looking seriously at the Black Liberation Army (BLA)
and such, despite the valid critique that there was a
certain Stalinist content to the organization. And
that raises the question of how exactly, without
getting into a centralized, arbitrarily disciplined
organization, you mount a clandestine struggle. That's
a serious question.
How do you go about it? It's not laissez-faire, it's
not everybody do your own thing. It can't be, or
you're dead. But the BLA and other such organizations
were willing to sustain casualties in a serious way
over a protracted period.
And they were ultimately burnt out because they had no
basis for recruiting additional members from some
broader context or mass movement to replace the
casualties, and that's a lesson to be learned and
addressed as well.
Weather presented a certain example, but not a model.
>From that example you can extrapolate the next model,
say, the BLA or the Puerto Rican Independence
movement. You can analyze and understand where it was
that they went wrong, address those issues, and build
a more viable model now. But you can't do that based
on knee-jerk reactions and notions of personal purity,
which is my critique of pacifism. You're probably
familiar with that critique, and the people who will
be reading this are probably reasonably familiar with
it as well.
But pacifism is not the only dimension that this would
apply to, anarchists in general have this zealous
notion of the purity of the political. They are
dismissive of anybody who defines themselves as being
part of a national liberation movement, without
examining that movement in any coherent way. When
someone sits down and talks with them about it, well
then their objections evaporate. But they won't
abandon the purity of whatever the particular posture
is that they're occupying long enough to become
effective.
That's the problem with the refusal to abandon the
mask and the black T-shirts in a certain context too.
The Black Bloc is more interested in the affirmation
of identity than they are in actually accomplishing
their goals and objectives.
These are transient things, I would hope. I don't see
them as being a basis to dismiss or discard the
impulse at all. I see the impulse as being primarily a
positive impulse, and you need to take to its logical
set of conclusions.
The Black Bloc is the preoccupation of anarchism.
Their willingness to physically engage the state at a
certain level, as well as to engage in discussions
that interrogate their own sets of precepts, are both
encouraging signs.
UTA: It's clear that the Canadian and US governments
have expressed serious concerns about the
anti-globalization movement and the radical wing
within it. You've written extensively on the
repression of radical movements in the 60s and 70s,
and specifically about COINTELPRO. Can you talk about
some of the key lessons that radicals today should
keep in mind?
WC: You have to be a thinking movement. We can
outthink these guys in certain respects. Part of that
is never underestimating what it is that they're
capable of, and never underestimating our capacity to
come up with a situational response to them. In what
used to be called counter-intelligence, now it's
called counter-terrorism, you have guys who devote
their entire careers to this. They have an aptitude, a
flare for it. And by the time they retire they get
really goddamn good at it. In a certain sense, their
work is based on perceiving what in the immediacy of a
situation might be best, based on their experience, to
accomplish a desired result. You could say that it's
more intuitive than codified, and our response has to
be the same. We have to develop bodies of expertise
based on experience in dealing with these things, not
just reading the books, and understand that we can't
come up with a formula or a recipe of what it is that
will work. We have to use common sense and critical
understandings of how counter-intelligence processes
have worked in the past, and to the best of our
ability, obtain information on what they have in place
now.
I mentioned the Delta Force earlier. There's actually
a protocol that allows the President the discretion to
suspend the Posse Comitas act and to utilize
particular forces within the US military for the
maintenance of civil order.
They go to the very highest shelf, the "special" of
the Special Forces. All the Delta Force does is train
for and execute missions to take out strategic targets
among oppositional groups, wherever they happen to be.
They were in Seattle in case they were necessary to
eliminate the leadership, as defined by the
intelligence sources of the US, of the people who shut
down the World Trade Conference. They've also been
introduced to control prison riots. They were deployed
at Waco, which ought to tell you something, and they
were deployed at Ruby Ridge. This needs to be absorbed
into our collective understanding of what we're up
against and to shape the nature of our response
patterns accordingly.
I think that this takes care of the idea that we're
going to do this by candlelight vigils, moral
arguments, petition drives and electoral politics: all
of these can be useful in terms of organizing our own
communities, but it's going to have absolutely no
effect on the structure of power. We're going to have
to go to bare knuckles and understand the mechanics of
power, and how it ultimately maintains itself -
obfuscation, mystification, and by keeping people
confused and divided. If people don't stay divided
they're going to ratchet it up to the next increment,
which includes false incarcerations and all the rest
of that. And ultimately you're going to be dealing
with the US military's Delta Force. Those are the
terms of engagement.
I run through all of that because by and large, even
among the self-described most militant sectors,
there's not really a recognition of what it means.
They consider themselves to be imbued with certain
sets of options based upon varying degrees of social
privilege, as if those are going to continue to apply
if they actually become a serious threat to the status
quo.
Now based on that consciousness, you can begin to
develop techniques that apply to the given situations,
and there is no recipe for that either. Maybe it's
affinity groups in some places but it's really
contingent on the situation.
For example, in some cases Black Bloccers say that
they're going to organize based on long term
friendships and interaction with people who they know
are not infiltrators because they hooked up together
when, in all probability, they were too young to have
been recruited by the FBI. And they've evolved as an
insular, self-contained little group ever since. It's
certainly hard for intelligence agencies to penetrate
groups like that.
The national structure of the American Indian Movement
was penetrated pretty successfully, because you had
people drawn together in an organization from a whole
variety of locations to function as a sort of a
governing council.
That was a really bad model. Where we were
impenetrable was actually on the ground with the
action end of the organization, because these were all
family units. The Means family, the Robidoux-Peltier
family and their cousins were all related and had
grown up together. Well, how exactly do you plant
somebody in the middle of that? You don't.
So I would say that affinity groups, however they are
to be defined, might be the situational response in a
given context. There are others. The thing that is
most critically important is to thoroughly understand
the techniques that are used by counter-intelligence,
usually at the lower levels, and not do the job for
them. That means not gratuitously calling people
'cops' in order to resolve political disagreements,
which has been an endemic practice on the left. Often
intelligence agencies don't even need to insert
provocateurs because they can rely on the activists to
do it to themselves. Maybe they stimulate it a few
times; they plant a few documents, they do whatever
they do. The rule of thumb should be: if it acts like
a cop and talks like a cop, maybe you treat it like a
cop. But you don't call it one. You don't feed into
that. If somebody is destabilizing and threatening and
they're compromising the integrity or the security of
the group, you simply eliminate that person by putting
them outside the group. You don't make a public show
of it, and you don't put out wanted posters unless you
actually have concrete evidence that this is a police
operative or infiltrator.
See, we put ourselves in such a compromised position
from internal dynamics and bad practices that all they
have to do is take this tottering structure, push it,
and give it some momentum. At the level that we're
organizing now, bad practice is our worst enemy, not
the police state. There isn't anybody that I know of
who is actually mounting a clandestine operation to
try to challenge the authority of the state at this
point. We're in a building period, and how we build is
contingent, in a large part, on the internalization of
these lessons.
UTA: In the US in the 60s, some people on the radical
left saw that the elements that were moving first into
struggle, the actual radical forces that could
overthrow the system, were the movements that had the
least to loose and the most to gain from such
struggles: the Black Panthers, the American Indian
Movement, etc. But how can we achieve the destruction
of state power without the conscious, active support
of the majority of the people, including significant
sections of the white settler population?
WC: You can't win so long as the bulk of the
population is actively in some fashion or another
deployed against you. But that doesn't mean that the
bulk of the population ultimately has to actively join
you either.
I think this is where the Weathermen misunderstood
what the dynamic was at the time. They thought people
were much more actively committed to physical
engagement with the state than ultimately proved to be
the case. In retrospect, it's clear that they weren't.
The Weathermen thought they saw a parade and tried to
position themselves to lead it. They were going to be
the vanguard. What's new? We've got three hundred
white guys who decided they had their finger on the
pulse of history, so they were going to jump in front.
They said they were acting in solidarity, but they
were defining themselves as a vanguard. The white guy
is going to lead the Revolution. They just
misdiagnosed the conditions that might precipitate
revolution, and ended up isolating themselves.
This would also apply to the BLA, although they had
far stronger base in the community than the Weatherman
ultimately turned out to have. The significance of the
role of the armed struggle was profoundly
misunderstood at that particular juncture by virtually
all of the actors. They believed that the armed
struggle was going to be the catalyst in bringing
about a comprehensive transformation of society. And
that wasn't the case at all. What led them to this
false conclusion was a withdrawal of consent on the
part of increasingly massive numbers of people. You
really had a significant proportion of the population
that was rejecting, in substantial part, the thrust of
US policy. They weren't going to go to war with it,
they were just not going to contribute to it. That's
the key.
You don't have to have the preponderance of the
population engaged in some sort of a final campaign to
bring down the government. What you do need is the
ability to cause an increasing number of people to
withdraw consent from some key sectors that keep the
system functioning. And if an appreciable number of
those people are going into more active forms of
resistance and are supportive, at least to the extent
that they won't give you up to the cops and that maybe
they will make a contribution, be it monetarily, or by
providing you sanctuary, I think that's attainable
over the long haul. You have to have a much greater
weight in order to take the structure intact and then
rearrange its organization, than you need to have it
begin to unravel and collapse, and that's actually the
aspiration that I hold.
You also have to create counter-models that people can
look at, that they can be attracted to: "Oh yeah,
there is another way of doing this and maybe I'd be
more comfortable in that context. I don't know for
sure because I haven't lived in it, but it looks like
something I might like to explore." That leads to
withdrawal, and creates doubt as to the inevitability
of state structures and that's what you're trying to
create.
Not that you're going to supplant the structure of the
state with co-ops, or little land occupations,
collectives and so forth. In the 70s in particular,
there was this whole notion that you could simply
create a society that you want within the shell of the
old one, and eventually the old one will wither away.
Well that ain't going to happen either. You're going
to reach a certain threshold and then the state will
begin to actively repress you and try to crush you.
The Black Panthers' breakfast for children program,
their community clinics, alternative educational
institutions, job placement programs, housing
initiatives, and all the rest, when viewed as a
package in and of themselves may seem like a very
liberal agenda. But it was framed in terms of a very
coherent program of self-determination, of
self-sufficiency, that sought to remove those service
delivery sectors of responsibility from the state, and
to place them in the hands of the community.
You don't see a lot of that happening these days. For
most people in the anarchist community who organize in
their little collectives and get together and eat
their bean sprouts and shit. it's only for themselves,
at the present time. If you want to talk to factory
workers, you need to connect with them where they are,
not where you think they should be. You need to get
over your prohibition on ashtrays. You keep asking me
why nobody shows up, except you, when you organize an
event - there's the answer. I've answered the question
about 15 times. You may have ideas, you may have
counter models and they might be constructive, but if
people - coming from the bowling alley or something -
have to spend 15 minutes reading your fucking signs
about what they can or can't do in exchange for the
privilege of entering your sacred premises, they're
going to go bowling instead. Get over your bicycles
and go down and bend a wrench with a gear-head for a
while. Do what he's fucking doing.
Maybe he'll learn how to talk to you and vice versa.
But that's like shedding the black uniforms. It's a
real psychological barrier to some anarchists, because
they've got the solution to the world's problems
somehow in code form in their minds. They posit an
implicit demand that people are supposed to
acknowledge the superiority of their vision as the
price of admission. So get the fuck off the university
campus and down into a union hall. Put ashtrays on the
goddamn tables. Make some babysitting services
available. And try to package it in a set of terms
that can appeal to the people you're trying to reach.
Call it spin if you will, call it packaging, call it
Madison Avenue - but how you pedal it, how you try to
reach people, is really important. They're probably
not about to put safety pins in their eyelids and all
the rest of that shit. I understand why you're doing
it, and I'm not objecting: it's just that you've got
to realize that there are some other people out there
you need to reach if you're going to be successful,
who don't feel that way. And you need to respect that.
Because you're ultimately demanding that they respect
you. That's a reciprocal proposition.
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