Saturday, September 11, 2010

Less Platitudes, More RAAN

The IMF Resistance Network has put out a short text entitled Beyond the Local/ Global Dichotomy: On Summit Demonstrations, Solidarity Actions and the Necessity of Consistency which, in the interest of continuing our explorations into the willfully self-limiting nature of today's radical milieu, we'd like to take a look a closer look at.

Now first off, let's skip over any pretense at an analysis of summit demonstrations or whether they are useful. Suffice to say, the general trend within the Red & Anarchist Action Network has tended to be away from these set-piece confrontations that allow for mass arrests and surveillance while forcing us to engage the enemy on terms they have set. This particular essay, however, perhaps because the subject of a summit demo is so stereotypically anarchist, gives us a lot to look at in terms of attitudes and conclusions that are becoming more and more indicative of the current state of the movement.

Some selected quotes:
"In the current climate of action in antiauthoritarian circles we have run into a little bit of a bind...

...an abstract anarchist threat that comes to take up a lot of energy and only engages for a short period of time, only to see that energy dispersed after the last dumpsters are rolled back down their respective alleys and the last windows replaced.

...The importance of solidarity actions needs to escape this odd format of global referendum on the popularity of our politics and become a way to understand global resistance to capitalism as a convergence of anticapitalist actions, actions that can be more or less coordinated, more or less in concert with each other.

...But solidarity needs to be seen beyond simply the dates of a meeting and needs to be understood as a constant stance, a constant series of actions in widely dispersed sites over a consistent period of time.

...Deciding that we will not allow our existence to be limited and defined through the flows of markets, and that we will do what is necessary to create the space to live a life that is worth living. But that decision must exist outside position papers like this one, it must exist as an active, alive convergence of the energy generated by anticapitalist actions.

...It is not about smashing capitalism, but about generating disruptions of enough magnitude, in enough places, consistently enough to make its operation impossible. That means that confrontation must feed confrontation, on whatever scale possible, at whatever site possible."

None of these are statements we might disagree with. Some of them have even been expertly worded so as to make us feel as if resistance might actually be possible! But then here, as always with these texts, is where we hit a brick wall: where is the actual proposal? Besides "getting serious about this", what exactly is supposed to be done that isn't already being done? This essay could be criticized as a call for martyrs, but in that sense it is only even more typical of the current anarchist milieu.

What is needed now - not just for a summit protest but for the movement in general - is the concrete presentation of steps that can be taken in order to tangibly achieve such laudable objectives as the creation of an "alive convergence of the energy generated by anticapitalist actions". Where is that presentation? Why does nobody seem to have it? The movement now is only capable of expressing itself in platitudes, each time becoming more articulate but in no way coming closer to any understanding of how the goals it seeks will actually manifest. "More people break more shit" is not a strategy. Not one that will be able to sustain itself, at any rate.

This is where RAAN comes in. The RAANista model is the only proposal on the table right now that would allow for anticapitalist actions - at any level of intensity - to noticeably build upon each other and accumulate into a consistent momentum. We do not wish to see the banner of RAAN opportunistically taken up by those who would resist the IMF; rather we hope that those who have already affiliated themselves to the network's project will become more and more aware of these current trends in anarchist discourse, and understand the specific gravity of these obstacles which have already been identified many times over, but will never be surmounted without the conscious and widespread implementation of RAAN as an organizing model.

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