Making Trouble on Main Street

Insight on the News, Jan 24, 2000 by Michael Rust

Demonstrations, acts of civil disobedience, violence or intimidation -- modern-day anarchists are determined to undermine the social order by any means necessary.

Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death"

-- John Ruskin

Q: What are you rebelling against?

A: Whaddya got?

-- Marion Brando in The Wild One

Brando's response in the 1954 biker film became a talisman for much of the social upheaval that followed during the next 15 years. But as recent events at the World Trade Organization, or WTO, meeting in Seattle seem to have shown, that line of film dialogue remains more pertinent to much of today's headlines than the warnings of Ruskin, the 19th century English critic.

The dominant media images surrounding the WTO meeting were not of assembled international bureaucrats nor, for that matter, of the myriad groups of protesters, mostly labor and environmental activists, who gathered to object to what they see as the degradations of a global economy. Rather, the airwaves and news columns were crowded with images that seem startling to the prosperous America of the late 1990s: Young anarchists, clad in black and wearing masks, battling police, smashing windows, looting stores and threatening bystanders.

It isn't that anarchy has been an unknown philosophy in the lush woods and clean streets of the Pacific Northwest. During the first quarter of this century the Industrial Workers of the World -- the famed "Wobblies" -- were a major presence in the orchards and logging camps of Washington state and Oregon. Indeed, massacres of Wobblies in the Washington state towns of Centralia and Everett in the years following World War I became part of union lore.

This time around, the forces of anarchy seem to have suffered from dumbing down, a common American malady of recent years. "They are morons," a participant at the WTO meeting tells Insight. The second day of the meeting, she says, "there were just a lot of angry young teen-agers trashing Starbucks and The Gap and yelling, `F--the WTO!' at everyone in suits."

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal, historian Stephen Schwartz, a student of anarchism in Europe and Latin America, noted that "perhaps the saddest aspect of the whole mess is not the resurgence of Seattle's atavistic personality but the utter ignorance of history displayed by most of those caught up in this so-called protest movement."

Northwest anarchists, notes Schwartz, once were at the forefront of opposition to Stalinism. During the turbulent 1930s and 1940s, "The ultra-militant dockworkers of Tacoma booted the Reds into the frigid waters and did not let them come ashore for years after."

But Tacoma's docks are quiet today, and nihilist youth seem to have replaced ideological workers at the vanguard of militant opposition to the state. In one of history's little jests, just as the protests overshadowed the meeting, so too did the anarchists overshadow the cause-oriented protesters who had gathered in Seattle. Joined by youths who took advantage of the chaos to loot local mercantile embodiments of global capitalism, the anarchists drew the bulk of media attention.

In Seattle, organizers of the massive rally angrily criticized the seeming nihilism of the anarchists. But others on the left rejoiced at what they saw as a bracing burst of anger. "In the annals of popular protest in America, these were shining hours, achieved entirely outside the conventional arena of orderly protest and white-paper activism and the timid bleats of the professional leadership of big labor and environmentalists," wrote Jeffrey St. Clair in Counterpunch, the biweekly newsletter he coedits with left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn.

And recent events seem to indicate that latter-day anarchists do not need an international meeting to unleash their version of creative destruction. The events in Seattle had a startlingly similar preview last summer in Eugene, Ore., a community of approximately 150,000 in the lower Willamette Valley. On June 18, police in Eugene used tear gas to break up an anarchist parade that turned violent, leaving eight police officers and some anarchists with minor injuries. At least 20 people were arrested as the anarchists raced wild through downtown streets throwing rocks and bottles, threatening motorists and children and smashing business windows.

The riot came at the end of a two-day meeting at the University of Oregon by a group called the Northwest Anarchist Conference and Gathering. The meeting featured debates and discussions about how members of the loosely defined group could protest the capitalistic system. This was par for the course for both Eugene and the university, both known as bastions of political correctness. However, the conference participants proved to be as interested in action as talk.

The demonstration began in mid-afternoon when about 300 people gathered downtown for a march, organized by a local group called Eugene PeaceWorks, to "reclaim the streets" as part of a worldwide protest against capitalism, industry and government. Just as in Seattle, most of the protesters were young, and many wore masks, shirts or bandannas over their faces. The protesters danced, beat drums, wrote antigovernment or anti-industry slogans on the pavement, smashed an old TV set and computer and burned a U.S. flag.