Juxtaposed Quotes

‎Kristin Snicklefritz sez (hold your applause until the end): “After taking a good nights rest and reflecting on all the debate over property destruction, Anarchists, and the movement as whole, my current conclusion is that those decrying the property destruction, those demonizing Anarchists, those holding up signs and chanting “peace” like they’re at a damn A.N.S.W.E.R. organized protest march (with some subsequently committing violent acts against -people- to “maintain” that “peace”)… have no concept of what is going on. Without Anarchist methodology and organization, this movement a.) would not exist; and b.) if it existed would not be this successful; and c.) would not have gone from 0 to Port of Oakland shut-down in less than one month. I’ve heard cries for the Anarchists to leave, that if they want to “go against the movement”, they should start their own movement. Something that has been echoed by liberal organizers in movements over the past 10 years, since the Anarchists mobilized against the WTO. Well, they did start their own movement. Ladies and gentlemen, this is it. And now they are ironically being told to leave. Alright, but if they leave, they would like to take everything they brought with them to this movement. Direct Democracy through the General Assembly, the Consensus process, Facilitation, most of the proposals we all vote on in the GA, Food Not Bombs kitchen organization, communalism, communal infrastructure, a rejection of state authority to be able to police the occupied space, THE TAKING OF SPACE, protest medics, the book shields, taking to the streets without a permit, the chant “Who’s streets? Our streets!”, Security training, safer spaces, a refusal to liaison with the government by the government’s hierarchical terms and process, etc, etc, etc. Pretty much everything that makes this movement what it is, what makes it so very different from the liberal psuedo-movements we’ve witnessed over the past decade, what makes so people excited about it – Anarchists. If you want them to leave – Anarchists, Anti-capitalists, anti-authoritarians – they will take everything they’ve brought with them to the table out of this co-opted movement. Then we can all watch the movement cave in on itself in a matter of a week.”

But if militancy approaches work, it cannot be assimilated to it. Work is the activity on which the dominant world is based, it produces and reproduces capital and capitalist relations of production; militancy is only a minor activity. By definition, the results and effectiveness of work are not measured by the satisfaction of the worker, but they have the advantage of being economically measurable. Commodity production, by means of currency and profit, creates its standards and instruments of measure. It has its own logic and rationality, which it imposes on producer and consumer. By contrast, the effectiveness of militancy, "the advancement of the revolution", still hasn't found its measuring instruments. Their control evades militants and their leaders. Assuming, of course, that the latter still worry about the revolution ! So they are reduced to counting the material produced and distributed, the levels of recruitment, the number of actions undertaken; obviously none of these measure what they pretend to. Naturally enough from this they come to imagine that what is measurable is an end in itself. Imagine a capitalist who could not find a means of evaluating the value of his production, and so settled for measuring the quantity of oil consumed by machines. Conscientiously, workers would empty oil into the gutter in order to produce an increase in... production. Incapable of pursuing its proclaimed goal, militancy only gives itself the name of work.