A Late Reaction to the "Bay Area Action Assembly..."

These comments are a little late in terms of their delivery, but reflect criticisms that were voiced within RAAN at the time of these events and can still be seen as relevant to future projects.

Following several well-publicized eruptions of social unrest in the San Francisco Bay Area in the wake of the murder of Oscar Grant and then again after the trial of the police officer responsible (as well as several other recent instances of police violence in central and Northern California), Bay Area radicals put out a call for an "Action Assembly of Anarchists and Comrades" on August 8th with the stated aim of developing a praxis consistent both with the prevailing mood and the status of the Bay as being home to the "largest population of anarchists in the nation".

From the outset, RAANistas had very pessimistic expectations about this event. We needed only recall the Summer of 2006, when a diverse grouping of radicals in the Bay Area were able to briefly create some serious momentum behind a few street actions undertaken in the name of "Anarchist Action". Soon after, word was getting around that Anarchist Action was to become the de-facto banner under which radicals would rally, and "chapters" seemed ready to spring up across the country. Truly, Anarchist Action seems to have been a high water mark in the potential of the North American anarchist movement. So what happened to it? After creating the country's most widely-credible anarchist organization in practice, Bay Area radicals decided to sit down and try to create it in theory. The resulting effort - the Praxis Conference - said much and accomplished nothing, and Anarchist Action dissipated as quickly as it had appeared, without anyone seeming to have learned any of the important lessons that the experience had to offer.

So what happened at the August 8th "Assembly"? The author was not present, but based on numerous accounts from the event it would seem that predictably enough Bay Area anarchists were able to gather together and concretely agree that they are against police brutality.

And so it goes. The "largest population of anarchists in the nation" again squandered a historic opportunity to seize the moment and create a visible focus for the revolutionary movement... all in favor of sitting down and trying to talk about how to create a visible focus for the revolutionary movement. Once more we must return to the assertion brought forth by RAAN: there is only one question of vital importance to anarchists at this moment, and that is how to accumulate and preserve the momentum of their already-occurring but sporadic and unorganized attacks on the system while creating a psychological linkage between them. We believe that only an "organization" will be capable of fulfilling these roles. Not the kind of organization you have to "join", and much less the kind you would have to go to a meeting for, or receive orders from. The kind of organization RAAN seeks to become is one only in the mind; it is a paradigm through which the scattered activities of the radical milieu become irreversibly seen as bound together in a single thrust for liberation. It is precisely what Anarchist Action was on its way to becoming, before it stopped and questioned how to achieve what it already had. It is a consciousness that allows us to step back from our activities and arrange them in such a way as to make them more effective than they ever would have been as isolated sparks in the night.

But one will never be able to make RAAN real and physically constitute it as a nationwide tendency by calling for assemblies to discuss the possibility. The only thing we can do is act as if it already exists, as if there were already a broad tendency of anti-capitalist action in this country; dedicate our actions and identities to its name, and watch as we achieve overnight what years of conferences and conspiratorial meetings have barely even dreamed.

RAANismo o muerte!