This is a piece I am putting forward in the hopes of provoking discussion at the upcoming national convention, which I would like to result in some sort of course of action decided upon for the upcoming year.

by m(A)tt, Hartford CT

This is a follow-up article to the piece I wrote as a position paper for the CLASH collective in our zine, Demand the Impossible, which can be read at http://www.clash.8m.net in the documents section. In it I laid out our arguments against the conventional antiwar “strategy,” the logic of direct action, and refuted the mythology perpetuated by those opposed to it. In this piece I hope to clarify what I’m advocating, some lessons I’ve learned, and take into account the developments since the piece was written in November 2005.

There are many different ways to apply the logic of direct action to the reality of the war machine. In fact, many of those applications have manifested in ways small and medium. Students at the University of California, Santa Cruz have consistently blocked the recruitment of their fellow students at each career fair this past year, most recently plowing with their large banners through the “check point” the school had erected to screen attendees. Activists from Olympia, Washington, including members of the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) carried out a campaign to block the transfer of war materials to Iraq through their port. One person, David Segal even went so far as to attempt to burn down a recruitment center in Manhattan. And finally, the DC Anti-War Network has been holding regular night protests in front of the residences of, among others, John Negroponte and Paul Wolfowitz. And while I’m not advocating any of these tactics specifically, I do believe that the general idea of being a pain in the ass to the brass is right on, and needs to become widespread, which I will elaborate on later.

One tactic that is thus far missing, for lack of experience or activity, is that of militant street protest. SDS was one of the first to experiment with this. Far from the guilt-driven masochism of the Days of Rage, it was a logical response to the ineffectiveness of well-behaved pickets on the one hand, and escalating brutality from the State on the other. If they chase you, run. If you out-number them adequately, advance and kick an ass or two. Before the institutionalization of the Left into the various vanguard parties, pacifist organizations and the Democratic Party, this was fairly normal practice, though this was before the time of cameras and legal observers, and so there was often a body count. This tactic was adopted by many a sixties radical and fused with the reclaimed affinity group (AG) model, still in use today. AG’s allow for snap decision making, fluid motions and an intimacy that could not be found in any Old Left and many New Left organizations. AG’s are defined not so much by peoples’ affection for one another so much as an understanding of one another; one’s fears, strengths, weaknesses, stakes and so on are acknowledged and taken into account. Thus, one can act quickly, but also consciously and strategically instead of going with the flow of the mass.

Aside from the famed 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, this model climaxed with the Mayday 1971 attempted shutdown of Washington, DC. Seen as an alternative to the violent and authoritarian Weatherman faction, the pacifist civil disobedience of the Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice, and the mass well behaved marches of the Trotskyist-controlled National Peace Action Coalition, the Mayday Tribe took up the bold, perhaps grandiose slogan, “If the government won’t stop the war, we will stop the government.”

Into this fractured political landscape came the Mayday Tribe, a new player with a very different approach. The group was launched by Rennie Davis, a New Left leader who had become nationally famous after the melees outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, when the federal government prosecuted him and other prominent organizers-the Chicago 7-for conspiracy. In Davis’s conception, the Mayday Tribe would bring the most politicized hippies of the time together with the hippest of the hardcore radicals. “Tribe” itself was a countercultural code word (the 1967 San Francisco “Be-In” that propelled hippiedom to the national stage, for instance, was known as “A Gathering of the Tribes”), and Mayday had a long-haired freaky flavor that was decidedly missing from either the Trotskyist or pacifist wings of the antiwar movement. Jerry Coffin, who teamed up with Davis when Mayday was only an idea, recalls it as an attempt “to create a responsible hip alternative” to the Weather Underground: “merging radical politics, Gandhian nonviolence, serious rock and roll, [and] lots of drugs.” Many-perhaps most-of the people who took part in the action were relative newcomers to the movement, from the generation that had been radicalized by Cambodia and Kent State.[i]

But Mayday was significant because while it was decidedly nonviolent, very few of the 25,000 participants considered themselves pacifist, and the tone was decidedly militant disruption. The concept was simple enough. Clog the streets of the imperial capitol with so many stubborn, obtrusive bodies that the government workers wouldn’t be able to get to their jobs, and the federal government bureaucracy would be shut down. And despite tactical mistakes and organizational dissension, the Mayday actions seem to have had a stronger effect on the war machine than many, or possibly any of the other mass actions.

According to one of the few historians to have studied the event, Mayday so unnerved the Nixon administration that it palpably speeded U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. White House aide Jeb Magruder said that the protest had “shaken” Nixon and his staff, while CIA director Richard Helms called Mayday “a very damaging kind of event,” noting that it was “one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the administration to try and find some way to get out of the war.”[ii]

This all begs the question, “how do we take this information and put it into use today? Can we? Do we just update some of the processes and tactics and attempt the very same? Perhaps farther down the road when the movement comes to a critical mass, but for now we need to develop our own processes and tactics, build a direct-action oriented movement, and apply the Mayday concept to the local, much like the actions in response to when Nixon announced the US would begin mining Vietnamese harbors in 1972, which were greatly attributed to the Mayday actions. Demonstrations sprung up from seemingly nowhere, and blocked highways, intersections and railways across the country. This is the concept of the social strike, a logical evolution of, but not a replacement to the labor strike. When we have demands that are being ignored, we cease the smooth functioning of whatever offending institution. We can see this in the translation of the labor sit-ins to those of the Civil Rights movement, the factory occupations to the university building occupations, and the general strike to the mass direct action of groups like the Mayday Tribe. Direct action is the principle of disruption applied to whatever power we have available to us.

Over the years, these tactics evolved and were utilized in the environmentalist and anti-nuclear movement, the feminist movement, and to some extent the Nicaragua solidarity movement. However, in most of these situations, the tactics were steered in less and less militant directions, as a result of infiltration by agent pacificateurs, or government and corporate agents intending to pacify the movement, as well as professional Nonviolence activists and bourgeois pacifists.[iii] This eventually led to the breakaway of groups like the Earth Liberation Front from Earth First! But much of this militancy was preserved and practiced throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties right up to the anti-globalization movement, when activists set off the biggest surprise to the establishment ever, catching them flat footed in the streets of Seattle.

Perhaps the most relevant example we need to look at is the invasion protests in San Francisco in March 2003. Activists with the group Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) organized a comprehensive campaign much along the Mayday Tribe’s strategy. Through the modern spokescouncil model they organized blockades at a series of intersections in downtown San Francisco and beyond. What happened, however, was that most of these blockades were committed to hold their ground and be arrested, with varying levels of resistance (going limp to locking down, probably increasingly militant). And so most of those who were in these organized blockades were immediately arrested. But there was such a buzz created beyond the typical activist circles (remembering of course that in March 2003 we did in fact have a mass antiwar movement) that most people simply made their way downtown because that’s where they understood things to be happening at that time. These folks in turn did impromptu blockades, and when ordered to move, they moved. When the police left, they blockaded again. And this happened all over the city, and so naturally the police were spread extremely thin. This process was facilitated by a continuous critical mass bike ride, which, aside from slowing down traffic more so (which was completely stopped anyway) proved very effective in communicating information between blockades.[iv]

We can either write this off as just a Bay Area thing, unattainable elsewhere outside that little west coast utopia, or we can figure out how to make it happen elsewhere. Surely, there are few places with as many anarchists and direct actionists (aside from Philly), but antiwar sentiment is anything but isolated these days. We’ve also seen from history, both recent and distant, that open, disruptive and defiant resistance against a heinous target is a galvanizing force. We saw this in the run up to the Iraq war; though not disruptive in the way we are talking about, it did disrupt the flow the Bush administration had been in since 9/11. After a year of lying in the shadows, we did finally come out and say, openly and unapologetically, that we were opposed to what was going on in this country. And lo and behold, people did respond to it, and mostly not with bricks and bottles. That was the driving force behind the February 15^th demonstrations, as well as the creation of UFPJ. The galvanizing resistance model was also recently seen in France this past spring, and likewise in France 38 years before.[v] But the instance we should be most aware of was practically the whole successful history of the original SDS. It was during SDS’s most controversial actions and campaigns (or perceived campaigns) that the inquiries started flowing in at an unimaginable pace. Whether it was the first demonstration against the Vietnam war, the draft resistance proposal that was given to the press, and then interpreted as an actual campaign, or the police brutality in Chicago of 1968. Dare to struggle, DARE TO WIN!

Looking forward, we should put at the center of our praxis galvanizing public interest through mass direct action, because frankly, either we grow, or we die as an effective force. One strategy might include the blockage of highways and city intersections across the country for a day or a week, in the interest of stopping business as usual. I don’t believe civil disobedience in front of a heinous corporation or federal building is effective whatsoever; it is too easily ignored, and it has degenerated more into theater than anything else. To be fair, what I’m proposing is also partially theater, but it is a show no one will miss. By engaging in this kind of mass disruption, we can force not only the issue of the war, but also what our role, as people living in the belly of the beast, should have in shaping US foreign policy. An important point to emphasize would be the complete lack of any meaningful legislative solution for antiwar activists, and likewise, the complete and resolute decision of not only the Bush administration but also of the entire political establishment that the US military must indefinitely occupy Iraq. And of course pose the question: so what are you going to do about it? One possible date might be Election Day.

One danger that strikes me is our dependence on the internet. Not because it is impersonal or cold, but because it is a rug that can be very easily pulled out from under us. What doubt can we have that if this government becomes genuinely afraid of its people, that it will do all in its power to disable the means by which the resistance is coordinating itself? I am no techie, so this is a question I have no answer to. But I call on those in our movement who specialize in internet security to study the matter and prescribe possible remedies.

One lesson I’ve learned is that direct action campaigns cannot be handed down to others to carry out, solely as a call-out. It has to be, for one, a critical mass and a consensus that has been reached. And for two, it has to be pro-actively organized through affinity group and direct action trainings, coordination and extensive outreach. In short, collective action has to be a collective effort. In this sense, we are at the mercy of circumstances. Fortunately, the circumstances aren’t that bad. SDS is evidence enough of this, and it is SDS that will make a campaign like this possible. With SDS we are creating a space for dialogue on such issues, free of the rigidity and top-down nature that infests the Left, and a network and framework to collectively act, learn and grow. And so this proposal is less an edict from my enlightened mind, so much as it is an attempt to provoke thought and discussion, in the hopes of getting us on the same page. I firmly believe that if the concepts I’ve outlined here are to go anywhere, it must be a decision come to by SDS as an entire organization, and then some.