G8 Mission Protests: A setback, not a victory

What happened in the Mission on Friday night was fucked up. As a participant in the action, what I saw was a predominantly white group of anarchists who overturned news boxes and threw trash on the streets and sidewalks of an area that is home to a large number of working-class and low-income families, including many Latinos, African-Americans and immigrants. Yes, there has been gentrification in the Mission. But the Mission is still NOT the financial district. If Bay Area anarchists are really interested in building a widescale working-class movement against capitalism and war, they need to seriously re-evaluate their communication with the working class - trashing their streets sends a message of "fuck you" to the people we are trying to reach.

Let me just say that trashing PG&E, Wells Fargo and other corporate targets is right on. PG&E has been screwing the people of San Francisco for decades and their greed needs to be confronted and fought by many means.

Props to the graffiti interventions against corporate America's colonization of our mental and geographic space via advertising propaganda.

But anarchism is supposed to be about mutual aid, direct democracy and the creation of a world free of violent coercion. Anarchism can and must grow as a political movement and way of life. Unfortunately, the West Coast G8 Solidarity Action was a set-back for the Bay Area anarchist movement.

It is true that several Mission residents did join the Black Bloc and expressed their outrage and opposition to economic exploitation and the police violence that sustains racial and class oppression. "Fuck the police" is a good beginning towards more deeper acts of solidarity between anarchists and the urban poor and working-class.

But as some anarchists continued to pull news boxes into the street and overturn trashcans of garbage, other Mission residents voiced their anger at us, accusing us of trashing their home. And no, it wasn't just yuppies that were pissed, but working-class Latinos and African-Americans.

While some activists may have felt that the disappearance of police during portions of the protest was a victory for us, I think there's a different meaning. If we were in the Financial District, there probably would have been many more cops following us - the rich get the best security forces (public and private) to protect their precious property. Honestly, the police were probably less concerned about protestors trashing the Mission - they are not paid to protect working-class and poor neighborhoods. They are paid to harass, attack and oppress people in those neighborhoods. In that sense, the actions taken against Mission residents (i.e. pouring trash bins onto the streets, not the strikes against PGE/Wells/etc.) is the same kind of “fuck you” attitude that the cops display towards most of the residents of the Mission.

We should ask ourselves if this is how we want convey the liberatory message of anarchism to our potential comrades and allies. Calling for a class war against the rich while we throw trash all over a working-class neighborhood is contradictory, stupid and offensive. If Bay Area anarchists are interested in expanding from a predominantly middle-class, white, punk-rock youth movement into a beautiful and righteous multi-racial, multi-class movement against capitalism and war, we should have a serious discussion about what went right and what went wrong on Friday night.